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This suggestion adds flavor and as such probably won't rank high on priority but...

I remember when I first started playing RW... ages ago.  A pawn charged over to my first table and sat there by himself (or herself, don't remember) in an otherwise empty room while scoring "relaxing socially" mood improvement.  Ok, ok,  I thought, I talk to myself sometimes... and I answer too, and its fun.  I'm not sure I'd call it "social" really but I'll go with it.  Then I wondered after building my first chess table... what happens when two players sit down and play together?  I couldn't wait for this to happen... seemed to be forever before it actually did happen.   To my great disappointment, nothing really.  Multiple pawns at the horseshoe pin?   Watching TV, poker?  playing pool/ billiards...  all really nothing.  Each individual gets their individual mood buff as if the interaction did not even happen.  Social interactions (which are varied and fun in game) it seems are completely decoupled from social mood recreation actions.  While being easier to code no doubt this always struck my as both a discontinuity and missed opportunity.

How about instead...

If(pawn is relaxing socially) AND (pawn has neutral/positive social interaction with other pawn) THEN mood buff improves or advances quicker
If(pawn is throwing horseshoes) AND (other pawn is throwing horseshoes at same pin) THEN mood buff improves
etc...

Alternatively and more complex...  relaxing socially without a partner only yields meditative class mood buffs since that would match us humans more in the real world (I know that matching reality is not a requirement for the game but it is nice when it can be done).   In which case relaxing socially (for real this time) buffs will happen much less often and the buff needs to be adjusted upwards.  I tend to set all my pawns to recreate at the same time because it looks cool for them all to be hanging out in the rec room together, and yes this fosters other social interactive events (eg fights, romance, etc.).  But I think a little reward on the mood buffs as well would be a nice touch.

Now the loner trait could be made more interesting too... invert or otherwise adjust the buffs so that meditative recreation is much much more important and the real social buffs do very little to support their mood level.  You could go so far with this as having any social interaction at all give a small mood debuff (or does vanilla already do this?  I don't know).  This would encourage us to put our loners in isolated jobs away from the rest of the crew perhaps with their own isolated rooms, etc.  Quite different from the ascetic but unique.

Add a "competitive" trait, now playing against others in any of the games should really improve their mood.  You could also add "competitive arrogant winner" and "competitive sore loser" for even more interest.

Anyway, just flavor.. thought I'd share.  Cheers.

Here is an admittedly complex solution to pawn chemical fascination trait problems (and possibly pyro trait problems): 

Treat the condition as a disease that only affects the individual with the trait and shows up randomly.  Notify the player that the pawn's addiction/ urges are starting to flair, they are acting funny and warrent observation.  The fact that they are chemically fascinated is not a secret to anyone after all.  A condition notifier with the usual circle status indicator is posted in their medical tab and the player must counter an increasing "urge" status from 0 to 100% (analogous to disease/ infection).  For chemical addiction allow doctors to administer an addiction replacement therapy (think of methadone for heroin addiction) costing one medicine and some unconscious/anesthesic time in bed.  The effectiveness of the replacement is determined by medicine quality and doctor skill, just like disease/ infection.  Fail to treat sufficiently (urge reaches 100%) and the pawn has an exceptionally high chance (perhaps 100%) of breaking, finding a drug, using it, and becoming addicted (current gameplay behavior).  Succeed in the replacement therapy and the pawn is returned to a normal state until the next RNG event.

Here's a parallel approach for pyro.   Notify the player that the pawn is acting strangely.  Allow the player to confine the pawn in a room with a fire source for a time (campfire, furnace, torch).  The strength of the fire source will determine how long the player must stay for the "immunity" to overcome the "urge" (analogous to disease/ infection again). Fail to provide a sufficient fire source in the pawn's room for sufficient time will result in an exceptionally high chance for a fire start break/event (perhaps 100%).  Succesfully overcome their urge by providing fire to play with and the pawn returns to normal until the next RNG event.  It would be very easy to just keep a fire burning in a pawns room all the time to overcome their urges, this seems entirely appropriate for pyro story telling.   You could add a zzzt like event whenever a campfire and bed are in the same room to add more story telling flavor.  Keeping a constant fire in someones room will become a problem in hot climates, this also seems appropriate for story telling.  Anyway, there are lots of nuances to this approach that need exploring but I thought I'd share the initial idea anyway.

The disease/ infection mechanic is already coded, this is just an extension of the algorithms already in use.  This proposal modifies game mechanics to eliminate events that players are really not enjoying but it doesn't nerf the intent of the negative pawn traits.  The application suggested here is still different enough from disease/ infection though and I think it contributes to storytelling for the two negative traits in a way that enhances the player experience. 

Balancing wood seems to be a challenge.  Separating Wood into Firewood and Boards could be beneficial for balancing purposes and allow tree planting to be made quicker again.  Some trees are suitable only for Firewood, some could provide both.  Obtaining any Boards at all for construction could depend on plant cutting skill if desired.

Players at all difficulty levels depend on the availability of easy to convert 'foreign' pawns when starting a new game.  To that end our current AI personalities often send a few single person "raids" early on.  We see the hapless pawn charging forward with their club intent on bringing the whole encampment to its knees.  On the one hand players love these events because its an opportunity to increase pawn population.  On the other we laugh because the story here is untenable.  Lone club or even knife carriers might be able to take out a single unarmed pawn but even a couple months into NB most settlements are not at much risk from this "harrowing" encounter.  Putting infections from knife scratches aside of course.

Alternative:  An aggressive single pawn encounter could be substituted for single pawn raids.  The arriving pawn is a guest without trade options.  The arriving pawn attempts to interact with colony pawns and entice them to leave the colony.  After all the place probably doesn't have too many comforts and amenities early on and the "guest" could spin tales of a wonderful town just over the hill.   As social interactions improve between the guest and a colony member the opportunity to convert the pawn one way or the other should occur leaving the player not really knowing if his pawns are about to add this guest to the colony population or pack their bags and leave the map with the guest.  The RNG chance to convert in either direction should depend on social skill and ideally mood as well.  In this way a player investing in high social skills and properly managing early moods will be rewarded with a faster growing population without the nuisance of imprisoning and converting.  But there remains a risk of loss of key colony personnel too.  Risk too high?  Kill or capture the "aggressive" but not guilty guest with all the normal consequences.

"Raids" are appropriate for a group of assailants who really do have a chance to capture/ kidnap/ or steal colony assets.  Single pawn raids don't enhance the story whereas aggressive encounters as suggested here would do the trick.  Aggressive encounters don't have to be restricted to single pawns but I think it would work best if restricted to one.  The AI could send these encounters more frequently than early single person raids and it would make for an interesting early dynamic imo.  Players would be compelled to do a little microing to keep track of who the guest is talking to which is a downside for QoL but upside for story telling.

Pawns with a cleaning assignment should not be dropping dirt/ filth/ etc.   Such a change would be helpful and relieve my paranoia as I micro- clean around my working medics to avoid infection.

The forbid flag on item prevents use or hauling of the item by pawns.  It would be very nice to have a "haul only" flag also.  Allow the item to be hauled to stockpiles according to the normal rules.  Do not allow the pawn to equip or use the item in any other way.

Some existing AI raid behaviors:

1) Siege
2) Sapper
3) Raid and attack to death (ours or theirs)
4) Raid and kidnap/ steal then escape
5) Raid and retreat on significant raid party injury

Many of these might include an "attacking immediately" or a "preparing" modifier at the start

I would propose to break #5 into 2 options:

5a) Raid and retreat on significant raid party injury, full retreat
5b) Raid, retreat, and regroup on significant raid party injury

In 5b have the retreating raid party stop at the edge of the map for a suitable period of time, essentially going back to the "preparing" mode.  If the colony does not follow them and ambush/ destroy them...  then let the raid party stabilize wounds, etc. and have new reinforcements arrive equal to some RNG, say up to approximately half the original party strength, join the raid after a suitable waiting time for a second assault on the colony. 

5b offers the reward of potentially more recruits from raiders that would otherwise escape, it also offers the significant risk of "here they come again!"  with a fair bit of apprehension drama and story telling potential.

I suspect this has been requested before but I didn't see it.  I dislike the busy work during every dry thunderstorm and flash storm of setting home area on around each lightning strike, waiting for the pawns to put the fire out, then setting home area off.   A standing "fight fire area" separate from the home area that triggers the pawn fight fire response automatically would be greatly appreciated.  I would normally set it to the entire map... or a very large area around my base at least.  But I really don't want pawns attempting to clean the entire map.

Also it's kinda bummer that You cannot call tribal for help because they dont have droppod technology - i would just expect them to come after day/two - so handling sieges/poison|psychic ships would be easier

The above quote is from the 1.0 thread under general discussions.

I have never asked a friendly tribe/ colony for help during a raid because I have few games under my belt where I have progressed to actually having a comm desk.  I like the early game so much that this has never bothered me.  And in those cases where I could communicate I forget that I have that option to call for help in the midst of planning for whatever sort of overwhelming raid or situation that is upon me.    Nevertheless, an idea worth sharing occurred to me after reading the above:

An interesting game mechanic for tribal would be to have the option to designate a pawn as a caravan "runner" to an adjacent friendly colony to seek help during a raid or other significant event.  That pawn would leave to the world map without gathering food or with minimal food, etc. and must go alone.  They would move at a very fast world speed and without rest because of the urgency of the assignment.  After arriving at the destination the runner would have the option to ask for help or return on his own (now starving and in a lot of trouble but perhaps still able to get home safely by the normal caravan rules).  If he asks for help, he would disappear from the world map and arrive WITH the assisting colony's forces a little later and from there resume his place in the colony on the home map.  I presume the assisting colony would feed and care for the runner on the return journey so they would arrive back in reasonable mood and condition. 

Proximity to friendly tribal colonies could become an important defense strategy especially for weaker game starts.  It would also be an excellent use for our usually very healthy non-combatants besides just hauling the wounded and dead during and after the battles.

-Cheers.

Stockpile optimization is a hot topic.  I appreciate that many suggestions offered by players do not achieve a positive cost/ benefit analysis for developer time and/ or processor cycles/ resources to QoL or gameplay benefits.  I believe the following suggestion to have only moderate benefits to stockpile management and it does not provide the benefits offered in more complex optimization suggestions.  However, I believe the method should be very simple to implement so might be worth a look: 

Because of the nature of stuff storage in RW, stockpiles can become fairly large chunks of real estate across the map.  Players become very aware of and sensitive to hauling distance and hauling optimization in their colony layouts and spend real effort to optimize their stockpile and haul route layouts.  Even small inefficiencies loom large in the mind of the players as you well understand.

Setting the recently implemented stockpile stuff re-stacking code aside for the moment, it appears that pawns when selecting where to place an item in a stockpile, if after failing to find a suitable existing stack to add to, they then select a random spot in the stockpile to drop their cargo.  This often results in players watching their pawns cross numerous suitable empty spots to place their item in a distant corner.  This would be a minor annoyance and not worth another thought except for the frequency with which this inefficient behavior is observed in every game.  Players currently shrug it off as a "cost of doing business" and perhaps that is ok, no development resources required to fix it, working as designed.  An exceedingly simple improvement comes to mind however:

Most stockpiles have an optimal direction on the compass from which they could be filled/emptied which would greatly reduce this inefficiency.  If players could assign a preferred fill direction for every stockpile ( a 1 byte parameter attached to each stockpile object ) as follows  (0 = random (default), 1 - North, 2 - East, 3 - South, 4 - West) then pawns could load into and retrieve items from the stockpile by sorting and then selecting the largest or smallest X or Y value of empty (or full, for picking stuff up) storage positions inside the stockpile.   I believe a button adjacent to the current stockpile settings "Priority" button with the option to select your preferred fill/empty gradient direction from a pull down list would suffice as a simple GUI for this approach. 

The code is a little harder for picking stuff out of a stockpile following a gradient since you undoubtedly just search for the closest stack right now and you may not want to make this task any more complicated.  If you incorporate this gradient following behavior into the restacking algorithm you need not check the gradient at all when picking stuff up, most of the time the stockpile would still work more efficiently.  If you did nothing at all to the algorithms for restacking or picking stuff up, I still think this gradient following algorithm for dropping things into a stockpile would result in significantly improved hauling and storage behavior and your players would greatly appreciate the benefits.

In summary, filling or emptying a stockpile using this relatively simple gradient following mechanism is more efficient for pawns than random alone, and players will perceive that much less time is wasted in unnecessarily long hauling tasks.  I think this would become a very much appreciated augmentation of pawn behavior.  Although I don't know the code base to be modified I believe it to be a relatively simple solution, at least for the case of dropping things into a stockpile.  The processor cost of one or two additional sorting steps is a cumulative load on the game resources certainly, but I think if you gave it a try you would find player perceptions and gameplay improvement significant enough to justify it.  Expansion to include NE, NW, SE, and SW compass points would be even better and only slightly more difficult to implement.

Cheers.