I think I'll take another shot at it. First time around, I got lost in the complexity and gave up after a day spent on exploring available actions and values to track.

Yeah, I can imagine how playing DF by exploring the actions might suck. There are lots of them and most don't make sense, especially in the beginning of the game.

The value of the tutorials is that they show the smallest working set of actions and how they interact.

It's me always trying to learn everything with minimum amount of tutorials required. Orbiter and KSP have beaten me in the same way - I had to read up a bit before being able have any kind of a meaningful gameplay.