Guys there's hope. Not all land is covered by aquifers.
Guys, you can remove the aquifers. Go into the dwarf fortress folder, find the text file for rock layers, open that, and remove the tags for aquifers, or just from selected layer types.
I played it a while back, but stopped since I got bored (and the lower RAM kind of held me back then. Still, its very fun and while the learning curve is steep, there is a very good community to help you out.
Anyways, DF is eXTREMELY moddable, everything but the base code is moddable.