It doesn't have to be good looking. It doesn't have to pretty. It doesn't need to be 3d, or need all these fancy bells and whistles. Nowhere has that been suggested (at least in anything I've written), yet people nonetheless frame their answers in this artificial contrast.
Once again: just make the UI intuitive. Make things behave as normal. Grant a few hooks into the GUI code so the community can create their own without having to reverse engineer your game. That is all!
You literally just suggested a pretty isometric visualiser become the new basis for the game UI.
That's a bit like complaining that vim is obtuse and to fix it we should switch its rendering engine to use proportional fonts.
> just make the UI intuitive
Oh yes, "just" do that.
If you actually have something new to suggest, feel free to contribute: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?board=5.0
Generally the attitude is perpetually "yes, it'd be nice, but then we also want all this other stuff". And at the end of the day, Toady does what Toady does, he doesn't owe us anything.
Ugh, no. Isometric views are a nightmare for usability. They look nice, but they obscure things and make for particularly error-prone tile selection, which is just poison in a game where that's the main thing you're doing.
I'd look to Prison Architect and RimWorld for UI inspiration, not Stonesense and Gnomoria.