The biggest barrier between you and the amazing worlds that Dwarf Fortress creates is, and always will be, usability and tedium. The ASCII art is really not that bad, but menu navigation is clunky and has inconsistent controls, and the world around you happens very slowly. You can amend the slow world pace by playing very greedily (attracting the fun faster than you need to), but the tedious control schemes require mods. And DF requires a massive amount of meta knowledge to really start of right with. It's easy to learn if you've got the wiki, but you still need the wiki.

So, Dwarf Fortress is a really well made game, but most players will need community resources to even try it out at the most basic level. These resources (quality of life mods, tutorials, etc) should really already be in the game itself.

But other than that, everything you've heard about the game is true.