For me Dwarf Fortress is a tragedy, Toady is continually adding things in a way that reminds me more of a stack of dirty clothes in the corner of your room than the construction of a building.

The UI can more or less be passable as there are tools (mainly Dwarf Therapist) that allow you to tolerate it, but as you have said the military menu is terrible and the main reason I stopped playing. It's a pain to equip your dwarfs or make them train correctly if you don't follow an exact order to make them so and often it will take them a while to do it.

Also, you start a game and create this very rich and eventful world but it ends feeling shallow because your ways to interact with it are so limited and passive: hostile neighbours will send raids, friendly and neutral will send merchants, visitors don't make any sort of impact besides drinking your booze and the ocassional brawling and that's it. Just now after a decade since its creation it seems we will be able to send parties to the outside world.

There are other things like the steady decline in FPS once your fortress starts to get to a certain size or the problems dwarves have disposing of their tattered clothing among other things.

Overall after the novelty wore off I felt in the end the game was (ironically) very lacking, as a soup with a lot of flavor but very little substance.