>Or factorio, where people build insane megafactories with millions of machines in them and yet performance is great and the graphics will still show you the shadows of clouds passing overhead.
Compared to DF, both of those are an incredibly simple simulation that doesn't lend itself to emergent game play. If you're trying to make the argument that they're just as complicated and still have fancy graphics, that's not the case. DF is far, far, beyond anything in those "simulations" in terms of the back end.
I lament the lack of graphics in DF not because the UI is awful... I've played worse, and in fact Fallout 4's builder interface comes to mind... but because it's incomplete. Certain things that have shown up in third party utilities like Dwarf Therapist are nearly impossible to do without, making the base game more or less unplayable after a release until the third party stuff catches up.
A lot of what you mention regarding tantrum spirals has been fixed in the new release... the issues with dwarf emotions are much more balanced now. It's still the same game, though, so I haven't gotten decades into a fort yet, but I'm hopeful it'll be worth playing beyond the point it was in the past where things spiraled into angsty dwarf death.
I called this Kerbal or Skyrim Syndrome amongs friends.
Games that are no longer playable vanilla after you've had the luxuries of some of the simple convenience addons.
Consider Battlefield or COD Warzone, which simulate the effects of actions by multiple players (including projectile travel) in real time and still manage upwards of 100FPS of near photorealistic graphics.
Or factorio, where people build insane megafactories with millions of machines in them and yet performance is great and the graphics will still show you the shadows of clouds passing overhead.
Dwarf fortress is a very interesting game and a very deep simulation, but the idea that it's such a detailed simulation that graphics would not be possible is just untrue.
Honestly the UX in dwarf fortress is generally just insanely user-hostile and graphics are only a tiny symptom of that. And I say this as someone who plays and enjoys the game - I've had forts with upwards of 100 idiots^Wdwarfs in them, magma moats, breaching multiple cavern layers, surviving necromancer seiges etc. But every time I play I have to go through that thing over again where I try to figure out how to assign a pet to a person, when I set up a military squad getting them to wear the right equipment is a total chore, minecart UX is completely baffling. Also the simulation is very detailed but kind of broken in lots of annoying ways, like female dwarfs randomly dropping their babies while working, forgetting where they put them and then freaking out, random tantrum spirals because someone went out in the rain and so just decides to murder their colleagues etc.