The Tavern

In trunk the following weapons now scale with Dex instead of Strength: Long- and Short-blades, xbows, bows, slings and (I think?) throwing weapons.

So first, the gratitudes:
I love the Long blade change! It's innovative, enables new builds, differentiates Long blades from the other weapons, feels realistic(ish), and buffs stabbers (by giving buffing one of their late-game transition options).
The change to xbows also feels good. Organic.
Paying attention to what my stats are doing to my weapon damage also really make me miss the bcrawl feature where weapons tell me their 'adjusted base damage'. So my gratitude to bhauth for implementing that feature. (Assuming it was bhauth; hopefully I'm not offending someone who deserves the rightful credit.)

I'm trying to run a character with high Dex, a Dex weapon and a shield, to see how it feels. My Dex isn't high enough to notice the difference yet.

I have one significant gripe with this change. (Insofar as I'm allowed to have gripes. I know PleasingFungus [the presumed author of this change] puts a lot more time into the game than I do.)

Making (long)bows scale with Dex instead of strength shifts the tone of the game towards "cartoonish fantasy RPG land". I know bows scaling with Dex is a trope in video games and fantasy and even table top RPGs, and that's precisely why I hate it.

Insofar as supplying a game-design argument would be helpful:
Having bows scale with Strength and xbows scale with Dex would differentiate bows and xbows further, just like the Long blades change differentiated Long blades from Maces.

I think a difference between bow and crossbow would be good, at the moment I think the latter are worse than the first, so most races haven't reason to choose them.

I think having some STR and some DEX launchers is a good idea, though I'm not sure about which should be which, though I think it's best to keep each category of launcher consistent, so that players can start with early-game weapons and progress to late-game weapons without having one or the other be contrary to their stats as they can with every other category of weapon. I also hope that any such changes are evaluated in conjunction with species stats and aptitudes.