I've been messing about recently with trying to keep a lone dwarf alive in the caverns while the rest of the fortress gets on with their own stuff. The trouble is that all the queued jobs get split between the fortress and the hermit. I can work around this by filling her workshops with suspended jobs though it takes a lot of micromanagement. So although this may be an odd case, and as a legendary miner she should have no trouble digging her way back to her husband and kids, it has made me think that a "managed/independent" toggle in the workshop profiles would be really useful.
Some other possible uses would be:
- send all queued armour jobs to a workshop that only your legendary smith can access while his apprentices practise with repetitive tasks elsewhere.
- leave a farmers workshop near your pastures on repeat milk/shear while jobs are sent to a more central location
- if separate toggles are available for different "managers" then later on some workshops could be assigned to your general manager and others to guild leaders
And I'm sure people could come up with other possibilities as it seems like it would add a lot of flexibility to planning.
For now I think I'll try and cut off her cave spider infested home from the caverns and dig back to her family, leaving a silk supply behind. Oh and gather a bunch of cassiterite and marble. She's keeping her spiky schist bed though. She made her bed and she can lie in it. And her husband.