As it is now, placing fences is a royal pain in the ass. You have to place each section by hand, one by one. Corner, end, and intersection pieces will all have to be cycled through (and crafted!) once they get in.
There’s already a wall tool, though, that does most of what we want to do with fences. We don’t want to stockpile fences, there’s not any particular benefit to having them crafted. It’s kind of silly to expect that a player would keep their carpenter out of commission for eons just to make a nice fence when they could be making more important things like furniture and upgrade tools.
So just use the wall tool to place fences. Corners, ends, and intersections can be handled automatically, a user can just draw a rectangle around their crops or town borders or whatever and they’ll get an instant barrier. Punch in a gate just like you would a door on a house. Builders handle the entire process.
I expect we’ll see something like this for several things in fact - just a matter of Radiant getting round to code it . Can’t believe they’d leave bits of the UI (like fence placement) in the state it is now forever .
I’ve mentioned this a few times, too. I figure a number of defensive objects and features will have some method of mass-placement in the eventual future. Not sure how it should be implemented, but I’d also hope for a way to stack fence sections so they don’t take over the entire stockpile when trying to make anything sizeable.
They could pretty well use the mechanics for buildings to do this. You could virtually just use the floor plan mechanic to design the area to be surrounded by a fence and then the wall adding mechanic to add the fence in and finish it off with the current door adding mechanic to add some gates.
As you say, making your carpenter work at building fences is kind of silly when you don’t need one to build the walls of a house.
. Can’t believe they’d leave bits of the UI (like fence placement) in the state it is now forever 
.