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I totally agree.
Fix and fine tune the game how it is now and then start adding new things.
I would like to see the economy and guilds again, and something that would make the game less of a micromanaging nightmare.
But despite all this i still absolutely love this game.
I'm going to have to disagree with this statement, Dwarf Fortress is in Alpha, and in general the Alpha stage of software is a time for adding new features, you might do a little bugfixing, to get the game/feature to a playable state but you don't do any more than that. The idea behind this is that there is no point doing expensive and time consuming debugging/optimizing if you are going to be adding a new feature next week that breaks everything. At some point it will become obvious that the state DF is in lends itself well to a big bug push and maybe some optimizing but until Toady decides that he is ready for that I think he should stick with feature implementation and simple bugfixing.
With regards to the release cycle, I think it's fair to say that many would like more regularity in terms of releases from Toady, but I feel that Toady has made it quite clear that he doesn't want to be bound too much by community expectations, I know that my code suffers when I face arbitrary deadlines as I don't think things through as well as I could. Besides, the thrill of opening the DF homepage each day to read devlog and check for a new update is a little bright point in my day.
edit:fixed a few little errors
edit:cleaned up few more errors!