I mean the big part of why I want the steam version is the mouse control (also waiting for adventurer mode, which is something I did actually play with original ascii DF with tilesets later down the road), yes yes I know its slower but when you are learning a new game sometimes its just easier to take it slow like that. Yes typically ascii games do have tilesets with them at least the ones I know of CDDA, DF, and ADOM, its just people want things to be "good" out of the box. They don't want to faff about for 2 or 3 hours to get the "optimal" experience.
Have you seen Aurora 4x? It is probably one of the deepest 4x space games on the market to this day. The problem is it looks like a spreadsheet and I'm sorry but when people are focused on gameplay only style games, one of the things that get dropped off by the wayside is the user experience and the UX. It is fucking efficient as fuck once you have it down but when you are trying to learn the system, its a bit of a cliff to overcome and if you don't have a ton of time to game that can be quite the burden on someone. Seriously for newcomers it can seem a bit counterintuitive that capslock/shift dramatically change what actions you can take (talking from personal experience was very thrown off by capslock actually have an effect on what you are doing since shift + key is pretty normal for rts/stuff).