If you're talking about the interface design, keyboard commands etc, ignore this comment.
If you're talking about the ASCII art I would say it absolutely is deliberate. DF is actually a sequel (Slaves to Armok, God of Blood, Chapter 2: Dwarf Fortress) and the first game was 3D. They chose to make DF a roguelike ASCII art game because if they had tried anything else, it wouldn't be half as deep as it is now. The ASCII art enables the depth that the game has developed.
As I said, if you are primarily arguing that they should keep the ASCII art and revamp the interface, you can safely ignore this comment.
Would people care to experience it if they could? I've always assumed with this (and a number of other things in life) that being a bit of a niche interest (or in this case a lot of a niche interest) in part creates the niche interest. There have been many rogue-a-likes with more modern interfaces but they have either not attracted or not managed to keep up the interest that this one has. Perhaps it is a nostalgia thing, perhaps it is a "nerd" thing; what-ever it is it works for them and their audience and changing the game to appeal to a larger audience might both fail to do so and make the existing fans wander off (and make it less enjoyable for the developers to work on: they seem to be getting quite a kick out of their baby and its current fans and don't want to lose that).
The comparison some make with minecraft on the "being a bit niche creating a niche" thing is quite fair, and this "if you were more like that you might have a much larger audience" comments perfectly valid, but minecraft's niche being an order of magnitude or few bigger might be in part due to luck (right thing, right time, critical mass didn't hit to early or too late, ...) rather than just the relative prettiness and intuitiveness.
Caveat: I've played neither Dwarf Fortress nor Minecraft, so I may not really have a clue what I'm talking about.
Maybe DF being a niche helps in some way. I don't know. But I do know that the UI is, almost objectively, not good. I know it's why I stopped playing. Once you get more than 20 dwarfs or so, managing who does what is ridiculous. (at least without external tools. I think the popularity and almost necessity of some external tools really does show that the UI can be atrocious at some points. (also note this is not a comment on the ASCII nature of the game, that's fine))
While the interface puts many people off once they are there, would the game get quite as much discussion if it was much more like other games rather than being somewhat more unique (for better or worse)?
It's probably just that there are plenty more things that they care more about than revamping totally the UI.
That said, they can work on what they want, as they're the developers. And they're providing the game free of charge to anyone who wants to play it. It's just a nice pipe dream of mine to be able to play the game without spending a month learning how to navigate the menus :)
You hate UIs you don't like. Which is a tautology. The interesting part here is that you've managed to convince yourself that UIs you don't like are objectively bad, and that anyone who does like such UIs is wrong in some factual way, as opposed to being 'wrong' in the purely subjective way everyone who disagrees with us on a matter of taste is.
Go too far in this direction and you end up with Jef Raskin, who disdained configurability because he thought he knew better than the people actually using the software how software should work.
It's been a while since I last played, but there is a "Designation" menu which orders your dwarves to perform specific tasks. You want them to build a staircase where there was some rock before? Awesome, they'll do it. You want them to build a staircase after you already mined the block? No can do. No warning, no error message, simply nothing happens. You need to go through the other menus, build a staircase and move it there.
I admit there are problems with the dwarf fortress interface, major ones, like job management. However this is not one of those problems.
Or rather - it's also a problem of information architecture to borrow the parlance from another field. The internal logical structure shouldn't be reflected in the external UI unless it's intuitive or discoverable.
According to you. Is it so hard to imagine others may disagree? Must you downvote?
This is like making the point that the sky isn't really blue it just looks blue - technically correct, but unless you are answering the question of why it is blue, correcting somebody on this is boorish, not interesting.
In this case we are talking about Dwarf Fortress, near universally reviled for its interface, so yes, arguing that some people may theoretically prefer it is both hard to believe and makes it seem like you are just being contrarian.
I must not. I have refrained from voting because opinions.
We can objectively measure things like whether a user approaching an interface can easily understand what options are available to them, whether the user can intuitively tell what actions to take to activate those options, whether at every point the user can tell what state the system is in through its interface.
It is absolutely true that if you are developing for, say, ascii-loving adult S.U.D. gamers your design requirements will be different than if you are developing for casual gaming tweens. But we can still say that the DF interface is pretty bad for the vast majority of users who want to play the game.
But instead UI people just say it's bad, period. That's the problem.