In cinema that sentiment has resulted in some of the most vapid, unwatchable trash ever created. In music this results in experimental, unlistenable noise that never seems to appeal to anyone enough to be self-sustaining. It's like an emotionally repressed teenager crying out, "you don't understand my pain, man! you'll never understand!" We do understand, we've all gone through it, and we've moved on.
If DF's creators want to be avant garde, then fine. But it is a lonely, and possibly pointless path, and again a damn shame, because oh how amazing it would be if it weren't!
Game development, these days, is so focused on hand holding, genre, and accessibility that it is only by truly following ones heart that something unique and new, like Dwarf Fortress, can be created.
Plus, it's still not verion 1.0, so who knows, maybe someday they'll fix the interfaces! But since other things are always in flux, it'd be a premature optimization now, anyway. Those pave the road to Balrogs, or something.
But, as you say, it's their project. They can do with it what they want. I can sit here and critique and wish it were better, and you can defend it, and together we change nothing. I just really want to play a game as inspired as this in a way that doesn't require the kind of devotion and study this game does, because its a friggin videogame and I need to devote my studyin' time to shit that actually matters (to me, touche).
(And besides, I think we human beings have a fetish for complexity that we really could do without)
I call BS
They've already been working on it for a dozen years, so what's another dozen?
Anyway, back to the UI: they can rethink or polish it in the run-up to 1.0; no need to spend too much time on before then.
The original link for this thread is basically a huge list of the things that are not yet implemented.
The rest of that list? Stretch goals. Or the entire vision. What, you think I've never seen that list? It's a big list, and it's stupid because it is so impossibly long. The entire vision is never 1.0...
It prevents everything from having the same esthetic and feel. The graphics of DF is also what makes it unique from the rest.
Yes, they're artists and this is their art, but software rarely -- if ever -- exists in isolation, yet DF acts like it does. You've all these nerds with too much time on their hands building all this ridiculously complicated infrastructure just to play the game in a way that is more comfortable, when instead the DF guys could simply allocate X amount of time and then be done with it. And this isn't a demand that the DF guys make the UI better, just a wish that they would put in a minimal amount of effort so that the community could hook in their own GUI code with a minimum of fuss.
Besides, I write code and debug fussy computer shit all day for work. Games shouldn't require that kind of advanced hackery just to play.
And who cares if they're artists? Neither the artist nor his art are immune to criticism (or, wishfully thinking, critique).