The learning curve is deathly steep, so I suggest starting with watching hundreds of hours of other people playing on youtube. Then getting the lazy noob pack.
The joy of DF is learning all the ways you can fail. Once you know how to set up a fort that can handle itself, the fun largely dissipates.
There's always somewhere harder to settle. There's always some new creative contraption that needs to be built.
True enough, and if you're into watching interesting people play games on video there's a lot of content to be had and DF is usually a fairly interesting watch since it can be relatively unpredictable at a certain point. There was one excellent guy I had bookmarked a long time ago, but I lost that set of bookmarks a while back.