Dwarves refuse to pick up ammo stored in stockpiles or in bins. This makes ranged weapons somewhat useless after a few rounds of practice during training.
- Store ammo in a stockpile then remove the stockpile to get Dwarves to pick up the ammo. To get around the problem with bins, assign 0 bins to ammo stockpiles and make sure the rest of your bins are used elsewhere. Requires some micromanagement. Also requires lots of space. It might be easier to not use ranged weapons.
More research is needed; most reports I've seen and my personal experience is that they don't pick up ammo in bins, but that stockpiles with no bins (max bins set to 0, in forts that have never produced a bin, etc.) still work. I've not tested this in detail in the current version however.
I actually don't find this to be true. I wasn't aware of this being an issue so I was storing all my wooden bolts in bins, and the dwarves picked them up with no problems.
However, I seem to have the bug with military dwarves leaving food all over the place, and as far as I can tell, none of them have woodcutter/miner labors enabled. The bug is related to the labors right, not just having skill in woodcutting/mining? I've ended up simply disabling carrying food in backpacks.
Also for the gauntlets problem - if I understand the bug correctly, dwarves don't care about left/right at all. So even if you had, say, 10 masterwork left and 10 masterwork right gauntlets, with everything else forbidden, your 10 military dwarves might decide to take 2 left gloves, or 2 right gloves instead of one of each. The only way forbidding would work is if you forbid all gauntlets of a certain quality except for 2, which were a left/right pair.
Instead of trying to do that, I've decided I'd rather assign specific left/right gauntlets, that way I can guarantee proper equipping. This works, the only problem is that when you go to assign specific gauntlets, ALL gauntlets are shown, even the ones already claimed by other dwarves, and it's impossible to distinguish between claimed/unclaimed. And to top it off it seems like the game crashes if you try to assign the same gloves to two dwarves. I've managed to assign gloves to my 3 main dwarves properly basically by educated guesswork as to which gauntlets are unclaimed. When the rest of my military/gear is ready though I plan to un-claim all gauntlets and then I should be able to go down the list and arm everyone properly.
If anyone has a better workaround I'd love to hear it...