Answer me this please: Why do you only want the people willing to devote hours and hours of time into reading instructions and learning all the ASCII symbols being able to play this game?
I'm sorry, I had to pick on this, because it's badly worded. It's because those are the only kind of people who
can actually play this game. It's not some Dora the Explorer colouring book; if you want to play it, you need to invest time into learning how.
Now, to respond to your intent, rather than what you actually said. Dwarf Fortress, whether it had a nice interface or not, would still be a very complex and deep game. I've heard a lot of people saying the interface might turn off new players, yet they never seem to realise that it could well be the complexity of the game itself, rather than any cumbersomeness of the interface, that drives potential new players away.
The point is, DF isn't an easy game to learn. No amount of interface tweaking would change that; it would merely make tasks faster and simpler for those of us who already know how the game works. The simple fact is,
unless you're the kind of person who will trawl through the entire Wiki to get a feel for the game, DF isn't an appealing game.
You know, I get the feeling a lot of people here haven't spent much time following other indie games. I find your complaints rather amusing because it's something I've learned to deal with by following the progress of other, similarly ambitious projects. Some of them actually succeed, by the way. DF is shaping up to be one of the successes; indeed, it already is, however it has so much more potential.
