I don’t think the old system cared about either proficiency or proximity, it just picked whomever was available. Besides, there was no way for the player to "make all labora enabled by default" in the previous versions, or even "enable/disable one particular labor for all", because you could only toggle labors for a single dwarf at a time.
Proximity, yes. But unlike before if you do decide to let everyone do everything now you’ll still end up biasing toward a set of dwarves that consistently gain proficiency instead of a freewheeling rotation of everyone doing everything and nobody getting good at anything.
It is a new paradigm to play through, and the immediate reaction a lot of old time players had was negative on this, but the idea was that instead of having to micromanage every labor for every dwarf, you can just let most things be open to anyone and it won’t be super wasteful.
There are a number of changes like that which are geared toward making something less tedious, even if some people don’t like the the change on principle.
I do think there is a lot of work to be done on the new DF but they’re out the gate running. Really need to implement a system to stop dwarfs from trapping themselves, which admittedly was never part of the base game but DFhack did a lot of QOL stuff that they should really incorporate into this new version.
> I'm quite certain that proximity has been accounted for for many years.
Except for when you desperately need someone to pull that lever to raise the drawbridge to head off a horde of feral elves, and it assigns the job to a staggeringly-sober one-legged basketweaver who's having a party in a copse of trees halfway across the map.
While vampires and other undead members of your society can be problematic, a setup where you can trap them in a lever room is highly convenient. They don't have any feelings and will have near 100% availability to pull a lever.
That's a good question! I am not too familiar with how job assignment worked under the hood in classic DF so I can't really answer. I'm mostly going off of a devlog and a followup reddit post from one of the Kitfox folks.