OK, a few ways to go with this...
First up, you start with talk about making basically every aspect of a dwarf directly alterable. When I stated asking questions, you then shifted over to talking about civs having different amounts of different traits.
These are two very different ideas. Having civs with different traits would seem to imply something like a civilization with a lot of trade routes and which has peaceful relations with a lot of different cultures would have a better linguistic ability, not just a general larger pool of points that can be sunk into any given attribute. (Or items or skills.) In fact, the idea that you start out with a blank slate on every dwarf seems to be at least partially contradictory to the notion that each dwarf comes from some sort of background that influences what they will ultimately become. How can you be a blank slate while carrying the baggage of your past?
This shift in focus implies that you aren't quite certain about what you really want to achieve with your suggestion.
If you have an inconsistent solution, it's time to stop and really ask yourself what the real problem is that you are trying to solve - oftentimes this confusion is caused by mislabeling the problem. This is why I would ask you to stop and really ask yourself what sort of "hole" in the game you think is missing that you are trying to fill.
Now then, onto the direct content of the current post...
I just wanted creatures that can be Malleable: mold them into whatever is necessary for the good of the fort/player. We are sort of like gods for these creatures, giving orders to them from on high; we tell them where and when to dig, when and where to plant, when to build items, etc. Would you like to be gods over their attributes, personalities, and everything else about them? We could create destined families (families that have great potential for heroics, skills, etc) and in-game castes different from just the sexes (for example: an optimized miner caste, optimized warrior caste, optimized leader caste, etc.) I am sorry for using this term, but we could just call it Eugenics (after all, Francis Galton, first cousin to Charles Darwin, came up with it in 1885.) and, for people who do not want to do Eugenics, the randomized systems would still be in place. That is what I am talking about.
So, let me ask this, then:
Is this really what you think is missing from the game right now - a lack of direct control over the "destinies" of "families" of dwarves? (Keep in mind that right now, the starting seven dwarves do not have families - they are generated from nowhere.)
Is what you think when you look at the game right now, "I really wish I had more direct control over the specific details I see in the game?"
Or is there something else that you are actually dissatisfied with at a deeper level than this?
What is the specific point in the game that gives you that bit of frustration that drives you to want to suggest a change? Is it seeing the stats of your dwarves, and knowing that you didn't set them yourself? Or is it that the stats or the world history don't really seem to matter?
Sometimes, it's much more difficult to identify the real problems that set us off than it is to actually suggest the solutions to the problems.
If you want to make a truly great suggestion, you have to dig down beneath the immediate problems you see, and ask what is really missing or not being fulfilled, and why those problems exist in the first place.
There is also the notion that you are retroactively changing the "history" of a civilization by determining that they were actually a proud warrior society or a scholarly society without actually rewriting the history of the civilization.
Right now, the ethics of a civilization has a major impact on the course of a world's history. When the ethics of one civilization are in conflict with another civilization's ethics, they frequently go to war. You are talking about changing some fundamental aspect of a culture, and that's something that really should have had an impact upon the history of that culture.
Rather than just punching a button that says "this society which conquered the world is actually a bunch of scholarly pacifists", maybe what you REALLY want is to have the ability to change a civilization before worldgen actually starts?
That way, you can say "this is a society that has a big focus upon warfare and conquest" or "this is a scholarly pacifist society", and the history that comes out of worldgen would be different based upon the choices you made in worldgen. That would be internally consistent, and not produce weird time paradoxes.
Alternately, what you might really want is a chance to just
have a broad-scope influence over the course of a given civilization's history during worldgen, rather than simply determining all this at the actual moment of embark, completely disregarding the generated history that DF has built.
Let me also respond to this in part by quoting something else I remember...
This from the recent FotF:
Would you even consider changing the relationship that the player has with the dwarves right now (as unquestioned overlord and direct allower and denier of all things dwarves can and cannot do), so that dwarves can become more autonomous and individual, and possibly create a better simulation, while on the other hand, potentially dramatically upping the potential for Fun because dwarves are stupid and very likely to hurt themselves unless continually babysat, or perhaps more importantly, if it meant that the player had less direct control over his fortress, and had to rely more on coaxing the ants in his/her antfarm to do his/her bidding?
Our eventual goal is to have the player's role be the embodiment of positions of power within the fortress, performing actions in their official capacity, to the point that in an ideal world each command you give would be linked to some noble, official or commander. I don't think coaxing is the way I'm thinking of it though, as with a game like Majesty which somebody brought up, because your orders would also carry the weight of being assumed to be for survival for the most part, not as bounties or a similar system. Once your fortress is larger, you might have to work a little harder to keep people around, but your dwarves in the first year would be more like crew taking orders from the captain of a ship out to sea or something, where you'd have difficulty getting them to do what you want only if you've totally flopped and they are ready to defy the expedition leader.
So it seems like a tiered or gradual gradiation into more decentralized control is part of what Toady vaguely sees in the future.
One of the real overarching goals that I see come up when Toady talks about what he wants the game to be in interviews is that he wants to make Dwarf Fortress into a game where you can simply generate a seemingly living, breathing world, with a full backstory filled with tragedy and heroism, all at the punch of a button.
It's not a world you, as a player, are directly standing in the muck building up with your hands, it's a world where you are just a participant. You are one fort among many. You are just the latest guy who managed to scrape together some basic equipment and set out on a so-called "adventure" for "fame and riches", but more likely an early grave.
You're not really supposed to be God. And Toady seems to want to make you less of one as time goes on.
Really, the other idea you had, the one about having a civilization with a lot of schools maybe making the entire population have a general +50 analytical ability stat and +20 Linguistic Ability and +20 Focus, but being shut up in school instead of playing outside winds up making them have -10 Strength, -10 Agility, and -20 Endurance compared to other creatures of their own species fits in with this vision of what DF can be much better.
It's something where a past
you didn't control impacts the sort of things you are capable of doing - like being dealt a random hand of cards, where you can't determine what cards are in your hand, but where you do have the power to play those cards as you see fit.
Sometimes, herding cats with independent minds is more interesting than simply having absolute control over automatons with no traits you don't force onto them.