Agreed. The fact that (depending on what action you're undertaking) there are three different independent ways, each with it's own set of keyboard commands, to specify a selection area should say something.

Or that 99% of the community relies on external applications which to manage dwarf assigned jobs, since doing it manually rapidly approaches impossible as you acquire more than a dozen dwarves.

I almost feel that Toady should hire somebody to design an ASCII-based UI for the game that actually works.