Most can't even be convinced to sit in front of the terminal to try it.
But I walked through a few friends on getting started.
PolishOne quite after two seasons, when I explained what was required for a farm.
I made a "newb mushroom farm" custom workshop mod for him, then he gave up once all the stupid dwarf behavior started coming up.
Not bugs, just the "lack of polish" mentioned above.
Military ScreenAnother gave up due to complexity of the military screen. He's in army, and told me he refuses to play a game more complicated than the instrumentation which took 4 months of study to use, just to give basic commands.
Interface, MicromanagementTwo others got sick of the "idiotic" level of micromanagement, especially regarding workshops. Both said how much better games like the Caesar series let you manage stockpiles, and I agree.
DF requires micromanagement, but gives you little actual control of the outcome.
All of them needed graphics packs to play. They were fine with primitive 2d tiles. Seeing "G" or "M" on the screen tells you nothing about what something it.
DF is too complex for 256 glyphs to portray enough meaning any more.
Only one made it far enough to quite due to game bugs. But he was very pissed off that he spent time on a fort which became unmanageable due to known game bugs,
old bugs.
He won't come back.
No one made it far enough to get annoyed by pathfinding lag, FPS death, a siege, or even the "losing is fun" aspect.
They all loved the challenge, just hated the clumsiness of the program itself.
Honestly, I'm getting sick of DFs shortcomings, which seem to be multiplying prolifically. Bugs will drive me away soon.
I play in ASCII, but it would be impossible to play without Therapist and DFHack. dfConfiscate and dfCleanMap in particular.
Toady's
depth-first manner of approaching things, and lack of interest in fixing bugs, is taking it's toll.
The UI is by far the most important "feature" to work on, but general "polish" and cleanup would have gotten them all farther.