The biggest single thing DF can do after graphical improvements is fixing the performance, perhaps make it not single threaded. I've been able to get past the graphics, and work through using the keyboard menus, but having the fortress come to a screeching crawl when there's a ton of things going on is when I stopped playing.
The game is supposed to be hard, but if you at all know what you're doing it's very easy to keep your fort well, and the only real risk of losing your fort is from you intentionally doing stuff that puts your fort at risk. You literally can defeat entire enemy armies by capturing them all with cage traps, for example.
This I can forgive.
Dwarf fortress is all about the crazy stupid ideas you can come up with after all. Want to build any interesting structures? Prepare for your dwarfs to get stuck every conceivable way one could possibly get stuck trying to build a simple wall. It can be incredibly tedious to accomplish something that ideally shouldn't take more than a few simple commands.
All of this I could live with. The performance without fail is what eventually kills my will to play. Want to do cool stuff with magma? Watch the game slow to a crawl. Want to run a big society? Watch the game slow to a crawl. Want to do anything remotely interesting? Watch the game slow to a crawl.
People go to obscene lengths to keep their performance, such as generating atom smashers that will 'delete' unwanted stuff from their fort completely, so the game stops wasting energy rendering 5000 rocks and how each dwarf is reminded about their childhood traumas as every rock reminds them of how their father died from a falling rock.
This game is so close to being great but falls short at the very last mile because the basic gameplay is fundamentally flawed. This is a simulator first, game second and it shows :(