By the way on this, it would be nice if the player could just hold down a key, like SHIFT, to avoid the prompts from coming up... so it could be up to your discretion, rather than having to toggle the setting in the init file.
Implemented already! Hold down Space, and all the prompts on creatures entering your character's view are auto-answered ‘no’. An ultimate nerve-saver in cases like a bird flies around while you're performing some time-consuming task.
I don't "use" all the creatures either, but you know as a player that they're there because they're useful; my suggestion was just that not everything in the game world has to be useful, it can be there for flavor, too.
I consider this as a matter of personal way to percept things. My own perception, say, differs from yours. As a player (and, well, as a man of zen philosophy), I know that they
are there... and that's all :) . Without any ‘because’. So it's completely up to me, to decide how to treat a particular creature. And in the long run, there are as many ways to percept things as many there are players.
Of course, I've got my own i-want-this-to-be-more-realistic stuff too. Part of them is implementable via mods, and the rest is quite easy to just imagine while playing. My point now is that there should be balance between level of realism and amount of code required to provide such a level, in order for the game to be neither too simplified from the players' view (and imo UrW is not), nor too complicated to develop. Dev.plans list is big enough already, I guess :) .