UI changes mean that you need to use the mouse for some essential stuff. The old interface was 100% keyboard.

That combined with an increase in the complexity for tileset creation means it feels like a different game tbh.

The old game had a commuity release called the lnp that had tonnes of community content, tweaks and utilities bundled together, while they have slowly being coming out on Steam as mods it just doesnt feel like the same game.

Again, I'm happy for Toady as him and his brother - and cat - are far more financially secure, but it feels like a different game. I might come back in a year or two and see then.

Not him but as someone in a similar position- I didn't like how the steam release axed the UI that had stayed more or less the same for the decade I had been playing DF for on and off in favor of a new one. I still love the game and highly recommend it, it (and the devs) are gems. But it put me off playing the steam release because while the new UI is cleaner it also (from the limited time I spent with it) felt less deep and less powerful. The old text UI was a kludged together mess that used just about every key and sometimes combinations of keys on your keyboard and had little to no consistency in layout or navigation between screens but once you got the muscle memory down you could navigate the menus and input commands blazingly fast compared to the new mouse and graphical oriented UI. I completely understand why they had to change however because it wasn't user friendly.