The good news is that Microsoft could never make a game as good as DF, even if they did make it with DX10 and if they put $10million into it, so there probably isn't anything to worry about.
The only time I've ever had a lockup on my computer is when running Windows, the last time it did it almost farked up my hard drives and cd-rom, so I just axed windows. Running a small jRPG game shouldn't have the possibility of totally farking up your hardware. Formatting that partition was quite enjoyable.
Big companies do not care about games like DF. DF gameplay is way too much complex already, so they could spend millions of dollars on developing a game like this with fancy graphics, but it would not sell good, that is 100%. Most of the gamers dont care about complex/intelligent gameplay at all. Look at WoW, GTA or Sims for example...and the big developers know this..but its all good, at least DF won't have any competitors.
Large development entities like that are extremely risk-adverse. The majority of their investment is placed into the game equivalent of those brainless summer action movies: non-innovative, predictable games with a simplistic focus which are deliberately meant to appeal to as broad an audience as possible.
They do invest in games targeted at a smaller audience, as well as occasionally taking risks on major projects hoping to manage a blockbuster and/or help improve a subsidiary development house's reputation and further their own overall brand, however these are the rare exceptions. Having dividends to pay and investors to please, they focus primarily on repetitive, mediocre content with which they don't care about high quality or innovation, since the goal is simply to produce something which will return a reasonable profit to maintain a predictable return on their invested money.
For every project a major game developer/publisher puts to market which is allowed to be avant-garde, or is given extra time to be polished and perfected, or which is spared from the watering-down process meant to broaden the target audience, there are tons of barely-new cookie-cutter games whose purpose is simply to keep the money flowing.
I, clearly, hate the brainless games that result from this... but at the same time one should appreciate that these trite, mediocre games are the ones providing the funding behind the riskier, more outstanding games. This rarity of innovation and risk-taking within the major corporate entities does also maintain an opening in the industry for independent games (like DF) to establish their niche by taking greater risks and/or targeting a niche audience.
If EA was willing to take the same kinds of risks and make the same kind of design choices that small independent developers are, and use their substantive financial resources to do so, there would simply be little or no place for little projects like DF to be able to thrive.