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[Jake]

That's not the problem, the problem is that if you can't use just an anvil alone, you need an anvil and a hammer, and someone walks off with your hammer, your anvil is now a useless lump of metal.  There's no reason to have to track an additional item you would never want removed from the vicinity of the anvil.

We are striving for realism here, you know, and dwarves not having to spend half a day trying to find a piece of vital equipment because there's not enough to go around and nobody ever bothers to put stuff back when they've finished using it is about as unrealistic as unrealistic could be!

[NW_Kohaku]

That's not the problem, the problem is that if you can't use just an anvil alone, you need an anvil and a hammer, and someone walks off with your hammer, your anvil is now a useless lump of metal.  There's no reason to have to track an additional item you would never want removed from the vicinity of the anvil.

We are striving for realism here, you know, and dwarves not having to spend half a day trying to find a piece of vital equipment because there's not enough to go around and nobody ever bothers to put stuff back when they've finished using it is about as unrealistic as unrealistic could be!

Yeah, I remember all the times I build floodgates from the wrong side and drown myself.  Wait, what?

Anyway, the objective isn't to make dwarves even more stupid and annoyingly hard to keep from killing themselves as they are already.

[sockless]

When I was thinking about the idea of the machines, I was envisioning the entire system being manager-centric. So if I was wanting 20 turned chairs and 20 non-turned chairs, I would use the manager and select build chairs, then I would be able to toggle the different upgrades that I wanted. So I could order 20 chairs with turning as one of the upgrades but I could choose to not have them planed; my other chairs, I could have them planed, but not turned.

By currency I mean that it is similar to the "gold" you speak about in Majesty. Metal is a lot rarer, so you can't just set up giant forges pumping out iron everything, because you don't have enough iron to do that. Metal right now is like hides were in the bronze age, they are a currency in which their value is determined by their relative utility value to whatever you are trading for.

[NW_Kohaku]

Except metal right now isn't scarce.  You either have it in absurd abundance, or you have none.  The only thing that can be "scarce" is wood right now.  If you have iron now, you have far more of it than you will ever be able to use.  In fact, that's the point, you're supposed to trade your steel away for other things, but there's nothing to really trade for besides (literally) dirt cheap sandbags, and maybe wood if you embarked on a glacier or something, because all you really need is stone, wood, steel, and food, and only metals are potentially missing.

Anyway, I don't see why you'd want to declare some of your chairs to not be made as high a quality as possible.  Why would you want to purposefully make a lower-quality item?  Why would you want to spend the extra time selecting which upgrades to use when you are never going to want to use anything less than all of them?

[Jake]

Yeah, I remember all the times I build floodgates from the wrong side and drown myself.  Wait, what?

Anyway, the objective isn't to make dwarves even more stupid and annoyingly hard to keep from killing themselves as they are already.

There's Artificial Stupidity, and there's artificial intelligence accurately simulating a stupid lazy git who won't put his tools back in store at the end of his shift and pinches someone else's if he can't be bothered to go and retrieve his own. After all, one can't have entities with procedurally-generated personality traits and expect them all to be good personality traits, right?

[sockless]

You'd want to make lower quality items because they are faster to make.

I'm pretty sure that the latest update was meant to make metals more scarce. I haven't played enough to tell though, but on surface observation metal is a lot rarer.

[Granite26]

You'd want to make lower quality items because they are faster to make.

Supply and demand curves?  Humans want X number of crafts and won't pay a sufficient premium for quality to make it worth making better rather than more?

There was some discussion earlier about less than the best quality of stuff, and there was a pretty strong consensus that less than the best is undwarfy

[NW_Kohaku]

There's Artificial Stupidity, and there's artificial intelligence accurately simulating a stupid lazy git who won't put his tools back in store at the end of his shift and pinches someone else's if he can't be bothered to go and retrieve his own. After all, one can't have entities with procedurally-generated personality traits and expect them all to be good personality traits, right?

Could we at least wait until we get rid of the accidental artificial stupidity before we go on to add purposeful artificial stupidity?  Otherwise, it's just antagonizing the playerbase to create extra micromangement problems when there aren't even solutions to that problem invented yet.

You'd want to make lower quality items because they are faster to make.

I'm pretty sure that the latest update was meant to make metals more scarce. I haven't played enough to tell though, but on surface observation metal is a lot rarer.

Metals are rare on the global scale.  If you happen to embark on an iron vein, however, you have more iron than you'll ever be able to get rid of, because you're pretty much meant to be the entire world's supply of steel.  When people use prospector, they come up with something like 15,000 ores of whatever metals they find in their embark.  Granted, you're probably never going to mine all that out of the ground, but that's more than enough to pave your roads in steel.  Oh, right, and then there's an unlimited supply of goblinite, at that.

Now then, on to chairs.  There's no reason you'd really want to do anything less than a maximum quality job, especially not for speed, during the normal course of the mid-to-late game.  You have all the time in the world, really, so there's no reason you shouldn't be going for legendary everything at that point.  The only time you woulnd't want to care about quality would be during the early game, and during the early game, you can probably just keep the craftsdwarf so busy they never build the lathe in the first place.

There's no reason to create an artificial dilemma of choices when the player will always know exactly which one they want to pick all the time, it's just another set of menus the player has to go through.  There's no reason not to automate any decision that isn't going to be a serious decision on the part of the player.