Not to burst anybody's bubble, but after searching for a while I managed to find some of Toady's responses to questions similar to this one and I managed to piece together a sort of "don't really like this idea maybe something else like it might work" from his other answers.
To quote him, "Manually ordering a dwarf to perform a specific series of actions that can't be presaged in the raws/code might be the only way to save your fort and might be a reasonably orderable action made by some official, but that kind of power can degrade the atmosphere we want to build. It's going to depend on the specific cases, but for the sake of guiding discussion on a wide range of future topics, I think it's best that the player feels that a dwarf's autonomy is being respected. The thing that makes dwarf mode not strictly a hands-off simulation is that you are allowed to compromise dwarves' autonomy if they hold fortress positions, to the extent that you are selecting actions that fall within their position's purview. If an order typically makes it feel like the dwarves are being controlled like marionettes, forced to do things against their will, etc., the order should probably be altered or removed. Presently, there are a ton of things that dwarves don't care about that they should care about, but this is the overall idea."
Now I don't want to speak for him, and if anyone else is getting a different message, then feel free to correct me. But that is the message that I'm getting out of it.