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There are ways to game the infestation too.

One thing you can do for infestation prevention is to lay power cable across all overhead mountain tiles.  They don't seem to spawn in rooms that are all power cables.  This will make the room less beautiful, and if you have it linked up to a battery now creates a big risk of explosions/fires.  So I just make sure that if I'm doing this, I don't link it to a battery.  Or I have a fusebox mod installed because it's silly not to have circuit breakers you can research and build when you can build space ships.

The other thing you can do to prevent infestation problems is to dig out large indoor areas you don't intend on using for anything other than infestation bait.  With enough of these you can effectively bait the infestations to occur where you want them instead of where they would be most problematic.

With regards to the OP the game has always been about tricking it, the storyteller system just works that way.  You want the game to think you are not doing well so that it screws you over as little as possible.  In whatever ways you can't trick the game you are incentivized to be minimalist.  Everyone could have super wealthy super expensive bedrooms but the raid scaling isn't worth the mood boosts.  You don't want to have many colonists incapable of violence or useless in fights because every colonist contributes to raid scaling.  You don't want to have amazing high quality plasteel melee weapons because they contribute to raid scaling far greater than they actually perform better than steel, and are as equally useless against mechanoid raids.  Sometimes you don't even want to grow too much at once because the game will be more inclined to blight you and screw you out of everything. 

Being able to put personal shields on them would help them a lot.  I think they are can still be useful but they are situational.  You need the enemy to be split up or few in number.  You need to be able to ambush them from around a corner or from behind a door close to them to minimize their opportunity to shoot.  The target needs to not be carrying a plasteel melee weapon that will wreck them.
grenades or molotovs.

I love this feature too and I'm not even a backer.  I can regularly request the coolest or most overpowered backgrounds. 

It could be he is working so much that he works until he is starved to the point that the game makes him eat his meal standing.  It could also be that you just don't have enough chairs.  It is an annoying debuff, I always wind up building either an extremely long dining room or several to make sure there are always tables and chairs, pawns will often eat standing otherwise.

I think your own caravans can be ambushed though, so there's some risk there compared to calling them.  Although if you just base immediately next to an outlander town maybe there isn't any risk of ambush.  Basing adjacent to outlanders should carry some risk anyway since it makes the travel time really short, maybe if there were more numerous factions and more faction standing randomization it would help.   As it stands currently it's very likely that they will be friendly.  Perhaps you could potentially show up and they could be under attack themselves, or starving, or they could tell you they just spent all their silver on an orbital trader. 

Weapons are now worth 20% of their base value to traders right?  Raids are based off of the collective value of stuff you have as well right?  Therefore because weapons are garbage for sell value, but calculated at 100% of value for raid scaling, the best thing you can do is to destroy any and all weapons you aren't going to use. This is because keeping them to sell them is completely not worth the risk vs reward.  To fix this it might be better to just lower the base value of the weapons to 20% of their current value, and then mark UP the buy cost from traders.  Otherwise I am going to be stockpiling excess weapons to set them on fire or destroy them with grenades and I could be wrong but I feel like you might consider that undesirable player behavior. 

I have had level 20 doctors kill patients putting on bionic arms and legs about 6 times now. It seems there is about a 33-50% chance that putting on bionic parts will result in a mistake even in a sterile room with a level 20 doctor. Not sure what is going on there but that seems wrong. Also losing the bionic part because of a mistake seems wrong and very annoying.

Using glitterworld medicine or what medicine for the "anesthetic"?  I always buy some glitterworld medicine to use for the bionics because it seems to up success rate, but I wouldn't claim to have done a statistically significant number of bionic surgeries.

If colonists are going to be upset about wearing dead people's clothing, we could really use a setting in the outfit management tab to disallow wearing dead people's things.  It's rather frustrating to make them take it off and know that I can't unforbid it lest they or someone else potentially rewear it.  Also, I personally feel that a dead guy's stuff should lose the debuff after awhile, one day you will wake up and it won't look like a corpse's tuque, it'll look like your tuque.  Some colonists should careless or not at all to begin with as well, and of course some colonists should care more or refuse outright. 

In terms of UI, I think simply tacking a D onto the end of the name isn't ideal.  I think you would be better off with a color change of the name to red or some other color.  When the trader showed up the first thing I wanted to do was sell everything that could give a debuff that I didn't absolutely need, but every item has a different length name, some include their % causing further variance, ultimately meaning I was hunting for a "D" as if it were a column when it's not.  A font color difference would have made the sorting far easier.

Thanks for the updates Panda.  Hope you don't need surgery. 

Which mods are alpha 14 compatible now?  Which are being discontinued?  I really love misc joy objects and I was thinking of trying out the quarry mod.  Ancient amulets is pretty cool too.

It has to be high for it to be worthwhile.  You have to understand that if the value is not high you could have planted many more  crops, albeit in a bigger space, in the same time it took you to till and then plant.  I do feel like it could be gated by research and even require a material.  Some kind of fertilizer or compost, perhaps a new plant you have to grow first and use as the material (Fertilily).  Or possibly just require the grower to have a certain skill level.

Ashiver: I can indeed just avoid researching / making things (or remove the recipes/research items from the xml, which is what I actually did), but the trouble there is that they still clutter up traders.

Is there a property I can set (or unset) to make an item not show up in all the various trade caravans/ships? I looked around a bit, but wasn't able to figure one out.

  If you haven't yet found a way to fix your problem I believe I have a solution.  I believe if you add an invalid trader tag to the base parent items that the traders that show up will never make a call for that tag when populating their list.  They might still as I haven't tested it myself but, I have another mod that adds amulets and rings and they never show up on any kind of trader that doesn't call for them.  What you are looking for is the base item in the weapons definitions for each faction, the parent item all the other weapons make a call to.  A trade tag looks like this.

      <tradeTags>
         <li>AMU_Amulet</li>
      </tradeTags>

If you open up Weapons_AD for example in your folder Mods\Rimsenal\Defs\ThingDefs the very first entry is the parent entry, the base gun for federation guns.  You can probably add that tag anywhere in between other complete tags, however my other mod places the entry right after a complete thingcategories tag.  You will need to do this for all of the factions of course.  I imagine you can make any sort of unused tradetag entry you like...

      <tradeTags>
         <li>IHateCoolGuns</li>
      </tradeTags>

      <tradeTags>
         <li>TougherRaidsONLY</li>
      </tradeTags>

      <tradeTags>
         <li>VanillaIsMyFavoriteFlavor</li>
      </tradeTags>

..or whatever you want.

Personally I love the weapon variety the mod adds, although I can understand thematic or balance concerns.  After Tynan introduced personal shields I thought the theme felt pretty different, and then he put in mega spiders.  After that I lost a lot of attachment to the vanilla theme since his own stuff doesn't even feel consistent. 

Ah well thanks anyway, I only asked because I remember it used to work.  Maybe it will work again in the future.  What's strange about what you are saying though is that stuffed batteries do get the beauty modifier I noticed.

Conduits no longer give a beauty bonus based off their stuff?  I tried placing some silver and plasteel conduits but the beauty reader says they are just as ugly as steel.

BlueWinds, the simple solution to your problem is to simply not research the "Defense Tech" research.  Unless it really bothers you to have research available you can avoid most of the weapons you don't want at your machining table.  You will still have some melee weapons available at the smithy but only a few, and the feral weapons available.  But if you avoid defense tech research and the research it leads to you will avoid all Greydale weapons and armor, all federation weapons and armor, all shard weapons and armor, and all Jotunheim weapons and armor.

EDIT:  Please don't bother with CR compatibility.  The weapons wouldn't be balanced with it anyway, and I'd much rather see new features or this mod compatible with the July alpha faster which CR will not be compatible with anyway.