I really can't agree. Rimworld might be more accessible, but it lacks DF's depth of simulation. Even if you ignore details in DF that are generally unimportant (e.g. all the intricate details of a dwarf's personality and the precise genetics of their facial hair), Rimworld's lack of 3D and fluid simulation alone make it vastly simpler.

But what really annoyed me about Rimworld, and why I never really got into it, was how "gamey" it feels.

One element is, the mechanics of random events, which feel extremely arbitrary. I'm not talking about random animals coming onto the map, that's little different from a legendary beast turning up in DF, but things like a solar event causing all your batteries to blow up for no reason. And random events seem to happen every few minutes. Whereas in DF, pretty much everything that happens, happens for a reason. There's randomness, but it's not completely random. If your fortress is wealthy, it will attract invasions. Forgotten beasts actually exist on the world map and have a history. That sort of thing.

In addition to that, crafting and combat are extremely simplistic compared to DF. In DF, bootstrapping an economy which can actually craft everything you need from scratch is actually fairly difficult and requires significant planning and investment. Many things require multiple stages of processing, and it can be very hard to find the particular raw material you need. In Rimworld, you pick up a few raw materials and can manufacture an assault rifle in a couple of minutes. And that assault rifle doesn't need ammunition, and is hopelessly inaccurate beyond 10m or so, for some reason. Compare that to DF where when a dwarf shoots a crossbow it actually does a 3D simulation of the bolt's trajectory. And in the background it's also simulating things like the bolt's temperature, and when it hits the target, it determines what happens based on the density and strength of the bolt's material and the material of whatever it hit.

Yeah, I've gone through phases of almost loving RimWorld, but it really lacks the depth and cohesion of Dwarf Fortress' simulation.

There's a sense of something missing, and RimWorld tries to fill that void with its random event generator, the "storyteller system". A better game would at least give you ways to interact with them - to predict solar flares or prevent electrical shorts - and indeed there are mods which help with this. But it just underlines the shallowness of the simulation, how these events are truly random and not connected to the game world in any meaningful way.

Rimworld is a better game but not really the deeper sim (I feel like it worked on distilling a lot of what made dwarf fortress compelling while making it much more accessible, and part of that is simplifying).

Rimworld is phenomenal… I absolutely love it, but I wish it had z-levels and the fluid sim of DF. Nothing is more fun than accidentally flooding your fortress with magma!