It really annoys me and it also kind of insults the intelligence of Toady and the hackers who actually mess with df internals :/
I'm not sure what you mean by "hackers" , but thinking and freedom of speech is legal in many countries . Each person can contribute suggestions from his/her fields of interest.
If we had some sort of guide it would be easier to concentrate on things that matter. As far as I understood Toady seem to resist changes that seem complex. If we show him a working model he'll be more motivated to work on it. FPS is a major issue because it's unhealthy for a program to run at 100% CPU 100% of the time.
Toady isn't resistant to change. People have demonstrated significant causes of slowdowns in the past, and those issues have been fixed. What you're doing is going up to a professional race car driver and telling him to put a bigger exhaust on his engine to make his car go faster.
DF has a working model already for pathfinding, and it gets the job done. You would need to demonstrate how your ideas would improve over the model that you know nothing about AND prove that the performance increase is worthwhile. The fact that DF is closed source doesn't mean anything to the hackers. To us the binary is just as good as source code and we have no trouble understanding it or modifying it for our needs.
For example, there is a function that runs every frame and checks to see if you have designated anything on the map (like digging). Map blocks in the game are 16x16 with a 16x16 array just for designations. The game doesn't scan through every block to see if you designated it or not, each map block has a dirty bit it checks instead. By removing the dirty bit and using a dirty list instead can eliminate hundreds of branches per frame and make that segment of code run orders of magnitude faster. The question is, will this change matter on a fort that is getting 20 fps? The answer is no.
DF preforms well enough and modern processors are amazing. When people are getting exponential slow downs on a fort, it isn't something that will be solved with a minor speed boost to a single function. They are most likely experiencing a bug. Just do the math, for a pathfinding fix to take a 20 fps fort to 100 fps would require your pathfinding code to run in negative amounts of time and violate the laws of physics. While my own life means little to me, there are people on this planet I care about and they would be snuffed out in an instant as the world was destroyed which forces me to take a stance against such a thing.
The best thing to do is generate forts on .25, use seasonal saves, and if you encounter a massive slowdown for no reason all of a sudden upload a before and after save to DFFD to let Toady and the hackers look at it. I personally haven't ran into the problem with a .25 generated fort, but I haven't had enough time to really play as much as I would like.