With the new, less frequent metals on the horizon, I have a few requests.
Now, since metals are less frequent, we will have to get a lot more serious about actually 'mining,' instead of incidentally finding a great deal of iron and coal as you dig out your fortress. Now, this is awesome, because it adds a lot to the game... But, you will no longer be able to ignore the fact that there are several nodes of valuable ore in the walls of your dining room. This means we will inevitable end up building a whole lot more walls all over the place, to repair the holes we punch through everything with our bottomless greed. However, it would be REALLY nice to be able to engrave these constructed walls that we will be needing to use dramatically more often.
Also, I've found if there is one thing that causes my frame-rate to drop like Paris Hilton's panties, it is the extra path-finding costs of large mining operations. So, that being the case, it would be super nice if streamlining the path finding code got moved up on the priority list a bit... This game is awesome, and I love it to death. And I want to play it all the time. But when my fort hits about 120 dwarves, everything starts going very slowly, and I become a sad, sad panda. This would be an even bigger problem with giant mining operations.