You know, these forums are really interesting.
I've been here about 2 weeks now, and I've already noticed something. There's almost a civil war level split between two camps. One says "This is alpha, all can be forgiven, Toady is a golden god, don't diss him!". The other says "We need everything fixed now, Toady should do what we want, screw his desires/wants/ideas, or else make it open source so we can stealfix the problems ourselves". I see very few people walking the middle line, which TBH is usually a pretty bad sign for a community.
I'm not firmly in either camp. I'd love to see the bug fixes go in (The game scales REALLY poorly as your fortress grows, making FPS rot inevitable, which IMO is a sign of extremely bad management of data). However, this IS Toady's code, Toady's show, and I respect Toady for what he's accomplished (albeit at a snail's pace) and I can understand why he'd want to focus on content and checking off his dev list instead of banging his head against the bugfix wall. At the end of the day, I can walk away and go play Counterstrike and probably be just as content, so it's not a case of arm-flailing rage for me. If it gets too bad, I'll just set a reminder on my computer calendar for 6 months from now to "Go check on Dwarf Fortress", and then I'll see if the game's made any significant strides towards end-game playability.