Eh, it's easy enough to just pull up dfhack and whip up a set of candy armor if I just want it all now.
But sitting there and painstakingly hacking away at a pile of bones from a monster you killed until you get a halfway decent helm and breastplate to parade around in is just thematically cool in my book. Leaving a pile of dragon bones sitting there to get scattered and do nothing is just disappointing.
We've got people who deliberately leave civilization and wander into the middle of nowhere for various reasons. Coming back and bragging about killing a dragon is fine, wearing armor you found in the cave is fine, but sitting there and carving the bones into armor (which is something you can do in fort mode, so the technology clearly isn't that unusual) isn't fine? Don't gotta make the different materials better if you don't want, but as it stands you go from finding a monster because some random villager mentioned them, and possibly learning about them through legends or coins/engravings/etc, plus a bit of fame from telling people about it if you don't die... to finding a monster to not just make things safer for others, but also to become stronger, better equipped, and so forth.
I'm not using the original wanderer's mod, I've tweaked it for my tastes, and I enjoy having the option of grinding my way up from the bottom or rushing to the top and enjoying the toys if I choose to. It was cool using advfort to dismantle some forges and melt them down then making a suit of armor out of them, but it wasn't as cool as tracking down an ettin, hacking at them til they bleed out, cutting the corpse up and wearing it around after eating the heart (or more accurately an item made from the heart) to gain some of its power... continuing around the world, saving kids, taking part in wars, tracking down a dragon and trading in my ettin bone gear for dragon bone gear.
Edit to add: the main reason I am so happy with adding a dragon bone template that is roughly equivalent to steel isn't because I can wear/make things from it, it's because it makes dragons really freaking tough, no longer are they one-shot kill glass cannons... you gotta work for it if you want to get the toys from them, and I've lost more than enough dorfs I painstakingly set up, learned about the area, grabbed whatever gear I could scrounge up, and so forth... just to remember that steelboned dragons aren't "whack it in the head and it falls over" type fights anymore, even blocking the fire with a shield only helps so long when they start snatching limbs off of you.