we saw someone on the kitfox discord say that the reason labor management was changed was because you don't want us to be able to micromanage our dwarves. is this a true sentiment, or were they just salty?
[we quite liked the degree of control we had in the old system, so if it was intentionally removed and WONTFIX'd rather than an unexpected side effect of the new one... well, we'd be a little sad.]
So, I haven't gotten a copy of the premium version yet, but that statement is probably based on one of the
DF talks (just do a ctrl+f search for 'therapist'):
Then there's the other branch you could take which is improving the ability to set jobs and micromanage things that utilities like Dwarf Therapist and so on do. This is sort of the spreadsheet approach or otherwise to make more management possible where it just kind of breaks down what the methods we're currently using.
And we are not really for a sort of spreadsheet approach. We wanna have, we wanna try and find another solution, not saying we have even found a solution there. And we like dwarven autonomy, but we are kind of mindful of the fact that it can take control out of your hands. So without kind of committing to a specific course of action, those are the things that we're mindful of and we definitely realize that it's not a tenable position that we're holding now, that the game really does become hard to work with when you have lots of dwarves. And we'll just have to kind of work with that slowly when we get to the next set of releases and so on.
And I haven't tried [dfhack autolabor] either, but it's along the lines of stuff that we've been talking with people about for years, but it's just a difficult problem about more dwarf autonomy, in their labor selections. And that of course raises a lot of questions about the role of the player and whether or not you can do megaprojects quite the way you want, and so forth. So you still want options that allow you to have more control over them. But what if you just set up the jobs and the dwarves were able to organize who does them fairly confidently, then that would be a whole burden taken off the player in terms of like making sure they have architecture selected on a dwarf or whatever.
As for the saltiness, from my experience, there is always a huge friction whenever there's a massive UX update in any given project or game (Blender 2.8 comes to mind, it too switched to something much more mouse-focused while being very keyboard focused), and I suspect that people who believe that no change was intended with malice are a little upset from all the friction.
Prolly, this labour system will be reworked a bunch of times, to find a sweet spot between people who want to micromanage and people who really hate micromanaging (or find it unnecessary). But before that can be done, there's a bunch of questions that need to be answered, like, can therapist work with the current labour system, or does it need a toggle to prevent it from interfering, etc.