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The vegetable garden mod already addresses all of these issues.  It adds a number of different crop types, among them beans which can then be used to make tofu, and the tofu used in place of meat.  I think I also saw red lentils being usable in place of meat, but I'd have to double-check that.  And there's a recipe for a vegan egg substitute. 

If a weight/mass system gets added to the game, we're going to need a way to haul heavier items.  IMO, that should be traditional beasts of burden.  I'd love to see muffalo and alpacas (with a pawn handler) used to haul  heavier loads.  Maybe some additional animals like horses or donkeys and even animal-drawn carts.  I'd love to be able to have my pawns harvest a field and then load up the cart, which one guy can then take to the stockpile.

They already do reproduce

I've never seen wild animals reproduce, only colony animals.  I think what the OP is saying is that they'd like to see the animal populations on a map not be an infinitely renewed resource.  I like the idea.  I think it would add to the survival aspects that, if you kill all the deer on the map, you may not get any more for years.  But if you leave a breeding population alive, they'll reproduce and you can continue have deer as a source of meat. 

It would also force you to do things like kill off rats/squirrels so you don't get overrun with varmint, which I admit is ludicrously dangerous at the moment.  Rats and squirrels should be far more dangerous to the food supply than the colonists.  But I digress...

It would be very nice to have a way to keep stacks of inventory near crafting locations without incurring the beauty hit from having stuff piled on the floor.  So I'm all for single tile racks or chests or other storage but I think it should improve the room to use it over just creating stockpiles.  (Being able to specify a max stack size would be nice, too, but that could be added to the stockpile definitions for broader flexibility in all stockpile zones.)

Currently chicken, pig, dog hordes are stupidly effective against raids. I think a natural remedy would be giving animals morale rating. Most farm animals would scatter easily after taking a few casualties (more courage in bigger groups). Wargs, wolves, bears, elephants, cobras and other predators should be better for combat and have a higher morale rating. Animals assigned to a colonist would be considered a group, their morale values summed up and after dropping below certain percentage they would run away.

I agree with the idea of giving animals more realistic behaviors, like prey animals scattering at the first gunshot, wolves working in packs and being dangerous in a group but easy to run off if alone, etc.  But to really solve the problem of animals being too effective in large groups for combat, I think you have to make the damage animals can do a lot more reasonable and make it impossible to train a fair number of them for combat release.  In history, how many trained squirrel armies have existed? 

I think animals need a pretty big overhaul, honestly.  Squirrels, rabbits, chickens - all small animals - should only be able to do minor damage and only to pawns with no clothing or armor.  And raiders should prioritize them as minor threats only, meaning they'll only attack them if they have nothing more threatening/useful to engage with.  A guy in armor should stride through a pack of chickens or squirrels without taking any damage, ever.  But to keep those small animals relevant, maybe scratches and bites, while trivial, always carry a small risk of rabies.

Herd/prey animals should also be untrainable for combat release, but as compensation perhaps they should be able to be used as a pack animal with a pawn as handler to allow the pawn to carry more stacks of stuff at once around the map.  So domesticating that docile deer or ibex could be useful, just not for combat.

tl:dr -  It is quite amusing that the game makes it possible to herd cats (as well as squirrels, turtles and monkeys), but I think it interferes with gameplay.

I don't think hidden traits would add any fun to the game.  One of my favorite things about the Hospitality mod is that it lets me know the traits of the wanderer wanting to join my colony so I can make an informed decision.  *However* this is all predicated on the fact that there are no good mechanisms for booting people from the colony once they've joined.  If a penalty-free means of evicting a pawn existed (like, the colonists all vote based on their opinion of the joiner) then I'd be much more willing to consider having random, unexpected traits pop into existence on colonists.  But even then, it would probably be annoying if random.  If one of my best colonists randomly decides he's a pyromaniac or very neurotic, I'm going to be ticked off rather than entertained.

Alternately, if colonists developed additional traits due to events they have endured, that could be a lot of fun.  A colonist who nearly burns to death might acquire pyromania, or might become incapable of firefighting, or perhaps was incapable of firefighting and decides they need to get over it and fight the fire next time instead of just standing there.  That, I think, would feel like an added level to character development because it evolves out of things that the player has participated in.

FYI, the game does alert you to any unhappy nudism.

It does, but in the cases of a male pawn wandering around in just pants, it doesn't prevent him from looking like he's buck naked.  He shouldn't look like he's naked unless he actually is. 

The game does give sufficient information to manage the nudity mood issues.  It's more about having the pawn's in game appearance accurately represent his/her actual clothing.

Pawns with musical capability would be a great addition.  It could increase the mood gain from a party as well.

1. Plants lose HP when someone walks over them. Just a little, but if you place your fields inside colony walls your crops will be often walked upon, and may eventually be destroyed.

2. Localized rains.

Rains currently affect the whole map. Whenever there's a big fire, invariably a big rain occurs and extinguishes it all. I'm not sure why this is done, but I suspect two reasons:
a) to prevent maps from becoming completely barren too often
b) there are performance issues

Well if those emergency rains were localized, you could write some insidious code that prioritizes extinguishing remote parts of the map first, and leave the walls of fire approaching your colony untouched. Fun for everyone !

Plantations should be natural fire hazards. Currently I never really feel threatened by fire unless all my buildings are wooden. I only need to build a small firebreak, not to completely stop fire but to delay it enough that an emergency rain occurs. This includes flashstorms.

I think performance is the main issue.  The work around might be, as the fire spreads, to only show the fire animation on 1 in 3 or 1 in 10 or whatever of the actual things that are burning.  The others could be represented with a blackened version of itself or some other static art.  If pawns are nearby, all the flame animations within some reasonable radius of the pawn would be shown to allow for proper immersion, but the rest of the map doesn't really need *every* plant's fire animation to run.  Then the fires could run amok without needing an emergency rain to keep dps from dropping.

Well my guys can haul whole elephants!

We really need a butcher spot, like a crafting spot, that you can plop down over a dead elephant/thrumbo/elk/etc.  Then haulers can haul the butchered meat in reasonable stacks.

The whole hauling system needs to be tweaked to allow pawns to take more than 1 "thing" into their inventory to carry.  A simple weight system would accommodate most of the inconsistencies with hauling.

Along the same vein, it would be nice if you could instruct the pawn to ignore their personal needs for tasks inside the specified priority area.  For instance, when a cold snap comes and kills crops, I'd like to be able to set colonists to harvest it all in the middle of the night without having to micro-direct them to harvest each individual plant.  I can restrict them to the area, but they'll just lay down in the field to sleep if I don't manually assign them to harvest the next plant.  Let me set a priority work area and instruct them not to rest until the tasks inside that area are complete.

Also vegetables absolutely don't need a freezer early on. Berries spoil the fastest and they still take a month I think !  Do you set up fine meal production early on ?

I try to since it's an easy source of mood bonus to have meals and a table.  My whining about the thrumbo was only that.  It's only be the last three or so games where the first thrumbo to come through has, invariably, set up camp in the middle of my fields and eaten all the crops.  When you've only got a 20-day growing cycle, that can be kind of annoying.  But I'd never had it happen before or had any significant losses due to animal grazing so putting up walls (especially wooden when I play with climate cycle and get lots of dry thunderstorms) wasn't high on my priority list.

Sorry!  (I helped with the derail.)

I agree alphabeavers seem to show up a lot, though I've had several games in A16 where I haven't seen any, or maybe one, occurrence so it feels pretty random to me.  I do feel like I get them a lot on boreal forest and not so much on other map types, but that's probably just my limited data set rather than an actual bias in the code.

My current game has a gang of pirates named "The Axe Frogs".

I like the OP's idea.  It would be nice to be able to specify that the room with a dining table and chairs is a dining room, despite having sleeping spots for two dogs.  Currently that makes it a barn, unless there's some setting somewhere I don't know about to override it.

The suggestions to be able to limit who can view art in bedrooms, etc has been brought up in other threads and I think most agree it would be a good addition to the game.  Adding hospitals to that list is also a good idea.