A newer game Rimworld takes most of the core ideas from dwarf fortress but packages it up in a nice gui with help text so you can learn to play in the game rather than with a wiki.
*except maybe space station 13
In my play experience SS13 wins out in terms of funny stories and variety, mainly because the speed of development is so much faster (especially on big servers like tg), it being multiplayer and there existing many spin-off forks from the usual space station gameplay.
How about "lisp taught me"?
English teachers can hate all they like, but I will not swap the final two punctuation marks!
Rimworld has systems, but they are generally pretty simple. Dwarf Fortress allows some insane interactions between agents that are all organic
The problem with DF is, it's hardly accessible. This is why so many people hope for the Steam version. It's often more fun to read people stories playing the game compared to playing it yourself.
DF offers you the illusion of a living world, that is writing it's own history.
Dwarfs discovering some kind of creature living on a mountain edge. They gain interest in it. Throwing stuff at it, talking about it, giving this creature a funny name. Later on your mason will carve stories on your walls in your castle and somewhere in the story, maybe, he will write about this creature.
It's these little things that make DF fun.
Would be amazing to see all this work that went in to DF exposed to a wider audience with some kind of UI improvements.
They are both interesting.
Toady is understandably disinterested in putting time into that element of the game, and I think he had a bad experience the last time he 'outsourced' it.