Stamp mills

[Snowpig]

In addition you would be forced to raise your M&M first to some "usable" levels prior digging, which would make claim development even more tedious as it is atm. Since the amount/purity of lime/granite/flint is limited by M&M as well, you would be forced to settle at a big stone/lime/clay quarry as low-M&M-digging would deplete it faster.

In combination with a missing "Quarring" skill in the beginning this would be a rather copious way to say "don't even bother doing that"

[Procne]

In addition you would be forced to raise your M&M first to some "usable" levels prior digging, which would make claim development even more tedious as it is atm. Since the amount/purity of lime/granite/flint is limited by M&M as well,

M&M affects only the purity of lime you forage, not quarry, afaik.

you would be forced to settle at a big stone/lime/clay quarry as low-M&M-digging would deplete it faster.

As I said:

But then solution is just as "obvious" - to have the amount by which terrain is lowered scale with amount of lime in the boulder.

Just have each additional unit of lime in the boulder lower one of the four corners of a tile by 1 (it currently lowers all four corners by 1 if I'm correct).

In combination with a missing "Quarring" skill in the beginning this would be a rather copious way to say "don't even bother doing that"

If you don't have quarry skill then you can't get lime boulders, so what's the difference? Unless you mean chipping lime from boulders mined by someone else. But then capacity of the boulder should be set the moment it's quarried. You are skilled miner so you can mine bigger boulders. It doesn't matter how skilled you are when you chip them.