It seems like factorio is very well optimized and is single threaded (as per devs). Even when you make a ginormous factory, everything works mildly fine on a good laptop. I think dwarffortress mechanics is a bit more complex than factorio's in terms of computation, so maybe some parallelism can be utilized there. But it seems like as long as you optimize well, single thread goes a long way.
I think this is only possible because factorio has a team of very dedicated programmers who care about performance. Tarn is one guy, and I don't think he's going to be able to pull out a comparative level of performance.
I mean, the pipe performance fix took one factorio dev half a year. I feel like having no forward motion apart from performance for that long might demotivate tarn, and that was just for one subsystem. In a game which already invested in multithreaded performance.
Maybe something to do with the pure voxel nature of DF. Pathing, liquid flows, etc. Factorio has a lot of pathing requirements, but everything is so much simpler when it's strictly 2D
