With the whole slew of properties we got in the current version, material trumps quality, even if we're speaking of artifacts.
It would be nice to know if intermediate quality level add something to the deflect/to-hit modifier. Seems weird and kinda a waste for an exceptional item to perform the same as a base quality one.
On the spoiler stuff:
The clown analogy isn't random at all. It came from the 40d version of the game, when
Spoilers about 40d. Don't read if you never discovered HFS there and plan to. I warned you.dozens of demons were crammed in a relatively small adamantine chamber, like clowns in a car.
I do agree that the analogy went too far, to the point that most people neither know where did it come from. As a forum tradition it backfires even, confusing newcomers, that in turn check the wiki, that redirects them to 'that-certain-place' page (now that's something that should be changed).
It's not about the suspicion. It's about the confirmation.
Most people obviously are gonna suspect about the dangers of Digging too deep, it would be much more surprising to not have such a thing in the game.
Chances are they even know about the game only because they read Boatmurdered, or One dwarf against the world, or those gorgeous comics by Tim Denee. They do know there's something down there, but they don't know exactly how it will influence them (those forts were from the 2d version; the drawings of Oilfurnace could have had some artistic license in them).
Let them decide for themselves if they want to get spoiled or not.
Adamantine by itself is not a spoiler, it's just a metal. You can see it on the stones menu, among the preferences of the dwarves, and as a choice in the metalsmith forge. It has been started to get called cotton candy after the release of the .31 version, because of the candy stick = upright adamantine weapon, and i agree it's excessive; most of the times good intentioned, but, again, with a high chance of backfiring.
Demons as well aren't that spoilerific, they appear in the preferences, and as the occasional goblin master or diplomat posing as avatar of a deity.
Now,
is a huge spoiler. Especially the peculiar version of it we have in the game.
We were much better off with just 'adamantine' and 'Hidden Fun Stuff'.
What i do -not- agree with, is demanding new players to not use the forum, players that may want the help of other intelligent human beings and not just the wiki, for a game with such a steep learning curve, just because i can't be arsed to replace the name of a certain place with 'hidden fun stuff'. Of course if they're gonna click the spoilers they have only themselves to blame.