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For those who don't know, Gourmand is a trait that makes a pawn starve 1.5x faster, have +4 cooking skill, and go on a food binge as their mental break. It is absolute garbage to have around, as I've recently discovered, but it's not just bad, I think it's completely misdirected. The idea of it is to have a good chef, but who will demand good cooking...but in practice, you get no bonus at all in exchange for a pawn that starves every single morning with the default sleep schedule.
It's very strange that an interest in fine dining leads to someone's body physically using more food. What's worse however is that the gameplay solution to this is to offset their food usage by...feeding them nutrient paste, which they don't mind any more than any other non-ascetic pawn. And there's no real penalty for this, because if they break, they'll just binge on food anyways, so you might as well restrict their eating to paste early and likely come out ahead overall compared to not letting them break...so your fine-dining-interested pawn is now the only one eating paste, which is completely backwards.
The skill bonus is also meaningless except in the super early game, and doesn't make much sense compared to passions. Why does someone whose passion is said to be fine dining simply have a flat bonus to cooking instead? Why would they not be interested?

Here's what I propose to replace its stat changes:

• "Hungry" saturation level increased (pawn will be annoyed by hunger faster, but not starve any faster, basically just whiny and often wasting food)
• Mood effects of meal quality shifted down, so fine meals are the neutral point instead of simple meals, and nutrient paste is utterly revolting to them
• Automatic burning passion for cooking
• Mood bonus from cooking

So in regards to the two topics here that OP conflated, yes, the system needs overhaul:

For social fights, I can understand wanting to punch someone and ending up with an all-out brawl.
What I can't understand is that noone tries to stop it and neither party stops until the other is unconscious.
Even if noone breaks it up, normally, IRL, someone gets an upper-hand and the loser would submit and/or go into a protective pose and just get bruises from them on until the aggressor figures it's been enough, probably with some agreement to the aggressor's demands.
There should be a sheriff role that deals with troublemakers by either stopping a fight that happens (and punishing the aggressor) or preventing a fight in the first place, and pawns that are in lots of sudden pain should probably go into a defensive fetal submission state for a while (both submitting and likely ending a social fight, or at least preventing wounds to eyes and other vital areas, as well as possibly hoping for mercy during a raid). Additionally, it'd be nice if relations from the aggressor's side improved somewhat if they won the fight.
More of a beef with the terrible melee combat system in general, but I also really don't like that melee fights with fists can lead to stuff like smashed eyes fairly often. I think it's not so much the chances of a particular area being injured as it is that melee incurs injuries seemingly with every blow, leading to dozens of bruises where you'd normally only expect a few.

As for the mood system, there's lots more wrong with it.

Let's start with mental breaks:
Broken pawns should really prioritize eating if starving, and forget their mood problem temporarily while eating (and permanently if eating solves their mood).
Pawns shouldn't remove clothing as part of sad wandering. It makes no sense (people pretty much only undress from madness when dying of hypothermia, not when they have a fit about the sorry state of their room) and is incredibly frustrating due to micromanagement (let's all play Hunt the Forbidden Pants!, the party game your insane uncle insists builds character).
Most people will smash stuff when in a rage. Starting fistfights with everything that moves is not too realistic.

Now, as for the mood system itself:
There's no penalty to unhappy colonists besides mental breaks (which really seems to be why mental breaks that make no sense are in the game to begin with). Why aren't people less productive when they're sleep-deprived and sad?
There's also no benefit to happy colonists.
No respect for hierarchy of needs. Generally speaking, people who are starving do not care a single iota about not having a fancy enough bedroom. A lot of the issues with having too frequent mental breaks is because stuff like having an old scar on the leg compounds with other minor issues atop serious stuff like starvation. Similarly, people dying of malaria should probably not be complaining that the doctor disturbed their sleep (which shouldn't even be possible in their condition) by coming in to treat them after dark.

Pawn I got from randomizing as a starter colonist is great at constructing, but basically nothing else. I looked at his backstory after a bit to find out why, and it turned out he had the blacksmith backstory as an adult...but a backstory making him incapable of smithing (or crafting of any kind) for his childhood.
I expect pawns to have adulthood backstories that are possible for their childhood backstory-caused incapabilities.

Screenshots:

I've had 4 marriages in my colony now and only the very first used the marriage spot I put outdoors. All subsequent marriages took place in the (rather cramped) dining area. The same happened in my previous colony, which had three marriages.
I would expect the marriage spot to be used for every marriage, or to get rid of itself after the first if it's one-time-use.

While I like the idea of smooth walls option as detailed by erdrik, I would go a step further on placing walls on as yet unmined border stone.   I would like to see the ability to place any blue print down in any unmined square.  Obviously these could only be built once the area is mined out.  Pawns would not automagically mine areas with blue prints on it, so it would not be a one stop mine and build here option, but rather an option to lay out a room, set it to be mined, and have pawns auto build things as the opportunity arises.  Maybe color the blue prints that cannot yet be built red to indicate that they still need to be mined out.

I'd go a step further and say that blueprints should be placible regardless of current objects being there, so that beds can, for example, be installed on a spot they're currently on or scheduled for installation in a place where currently something is to be moved from. There's a lot of waiting around in Rimworld for a certain thing to be done just to schedule something blueprintwise, and it makes reorganizing a room ridiculous.

It's extremely frustrating when a particular raider with a bionic part is killed instead of incapacitated, and it strains believability that you can't hack off their leg moments after death when most of the body is still quite intact.

With the update, bionics seem to come later and less predictably now that you mostly rely on visiting traders; exotic goods traders and pirate merchants are rather rare. It really would help if bionics could be salvaged from the occasional dead pirate or colonist. Also, any colony worth a damn has to grow and colonists get scars all the time, so while the number of bionics may only increase over time by recycling them, the number of colonists that need bionics naturally goes up too.

I'd really like it if there were different medications, including ones that could outright cure something in a few treatments. Right now, the medicine you have to buy gets constantly wasted as an anasthetic when it really should be being used on the guy with carcinoma, and parasites and the flu just last however long no matter what, which makes them a severe problem.

With regard to parasites, sleeping sickness, and malaria in particular, there's actual curative drugs available today; it's rather silly that colonists can make power armor, but can't stop malaria...

[seven]

A relatively uneventful colony, but I set out with a married pair with one being a psychopath. Somehow, despite their marriage persisting for years, they just now after landing divorce. Also, we got a cat for a pet; it's completely useless, can't even be trained to be obedient.

Not long after those two divorce, I get a small trading group come in, with literally just meals to trade...and I notice they have a few more cobras than I generally expect. Soon enough, one of them being ugly, provokes another into a fight near my graveyard, and RIP Blitz the engineer.


While I'm staring in shock at this bizarre display affirming that these villagers consider an event dull without at least one murder, a second group comes in...with seven Yorkshire Terriers.


There's three Chinchillas too, which I didn't notice at first.

The popup for them says there's a relation to someone in my colony! It's...my pirate prisoner's wife; and they're still in love despite having standing orders to kill each other.


We need to build a ship, fast, this planet clearly has some kind of contagious disease that makes people hoard large numbers of useless animals and hate the people they live with, and we are all already infected; maybe if we wait in cryosleep, we can get cured when we wake up.

Diseases and infections currently are rather broken. The big issue is that IRL you don't need to be in bed 24/7 next to an EKG from the moment you get a disease to have good immunity; EKGs only really help when things are going really bad and you just need to not exert yourself much (no work) and get good rest and good medicine. In Rimworld, however, EKGs and resting are just a constant immunity buff, and even the flu can easily kill a healthy middle-aged colonist who doesn't get that buff and good medicine constantly.

I find arid shrubland to be the best biome. Year-round growing with low rainfall, plenty of big animals to tame or hunt, and you never have to worry about malaria or sleeping sickness.

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Standard corner defense in my colonies, allows for cover for my own guys without providing the enemy cover when I have to fall back to the next one.
I'll probably switch to killboxes next time I play with lots of mods; embrasures and better turrets make it too good not too, even with the threat of sappers.

I suspect they were removed because conduits are weak and break easy from things like mortar fire, but walls don't. Conduit walls would withstand a direct hit with no loss of power connectivity, yet costed the same amount of materials and work, so they were a bit overpowered.
Having to build a special type of wall to avoid losing power from sieges clutters the build menu and makes things annoying anyways. Better to just not have that extra bit of micromanagement and lay out power separately from walls.

One of the tricks to joy is that colonists positioned atop a bit of furniture will get comfortability mood bonuses from being on it. Put some superior or better armchairs in front of TVs, chess tables, and horseshoe pins at the spots colonists use them from and you'll have colonists getting both joy-filled and luxuriantly comfortable bonuses at the same time. Note however, that a horseshoe pin has 12 spots it can be used from, 4 if it's in a corner; at least they seem to prefer to use it where the chair is from what I've seen.

Early on, I like to have a horseshoe pin and a telescope so that colonists don't waste as much time walking across the map to watch clouds and see the shoddy grave of Raider #21. When I build a rec room, I start with a horseshoe pin and a television or two, removing the old pin, and then make chess tables and a pool table. Once everything's in place comes the armchairs, and then my colonists are set for joy.
Horseshoe pins currently seem to be the best option in general before you get televisions because of the social chat bonus from colonists using them together, plus they're cheap. Extra dining chairs in the dining room are okay, but it's difficult to get good quality dining chairs early on, and it takes away from eating space, so I sometimes actually disable gather spot on dining tables.

I think the main problem with this is the question of what the prosthetics are made of. Basically, the resource pool in Rimworld is quite limited as far as artificial stuff; everything has to be made of plasteel, steel, stone, or wood, which leads to some silliness like sandbags being made of steel. There are mods that add sand as a resource, and it's actually quite nice.
I've played with the mod that adds craftable prosthetics, bionics, and organs, and it tends to use plasteel for the simple prosthetics and above, which is ridiculous as, in a colony with abundant plasteel, you can already just sell it to buy the prosthetics and bionics.

I do think it's silly we can only make peg legs and dentures in a colony that can make spaceships. I think it would be nice if we had a plastic resource (like plasteel in terms of how you get it, but not coming from mechanoid disassembly and has to be bought or mined) and a researchable 3D printer that could make prosthetics and various other things from it.

Fire is currently the most OP thing in the game due to pawns forgetting absolutely everything and running around like mad in front of guys with machine guns just because they have a small little fire on their foot.
If this happens, it should also mean that some raiders come equipped with painstoppers.

It is really silly that stuff like the tailor's workbench uses power when idle - can't the colonists just unplug the damn sewing machine when they stop using it?
I do think that the cook stove and electric smelter should still use power when idle, but to keep warmed up (can't cook with a cold stove you've just turned on); unfortunately, currently both are just like every other power-using bench in that they just magically hit the right temperature the moment they're turned on.

Xerigium is great because, otherwise, you have to rely on stupidly pricey traders...losing that much silver early on just to keep colonists from dying of infections would really screw the current balance.
There's also a good chance your crops won't make it to harvest and they take a while to grow. I think it's fine.