If it's easier this way for you then it's a better way for you to do it :) and yeh it's a different way of thinking/visualising. Gotta find what works best for your brain! I went the other way (started by smashing prims together into the basic shape and then start detailing) and like I said it did my head in so I just started pulling everything out from the head (I would make the head out of the cube/sphere that I started with and go from there) which I'm going to say is much more inefficient as it does actually take me longer but it makes me much less angry XD
Gotta agree with you on dyantopo's very violent smoothing though! I cannot for the life of me work out what settings I need to tweak ^_^; I've found multires sculpt (most of what I'm doing at the moment now that I have most of my base models good to go) so much easier to manage (in general, going up and down levels can be a bit unpredictable).
For dwarves my understanding is the limbs should still be proportionate to each other while being short for the torso. Maybe it's the angle and/or the boots but the limbs don't look proportionate to each other to me. It might be fine once you have everything else in :)
Yeah, I'm trying it out like this anyway, and I'm liking it. I need to check the arms. It was a rough estimate. I hope it doesn't bother me too much.