Hi Craig,
Thank you for sharing your thoughts. We really appreciate it 
To make it clearer, we introduce the dependencies API as a temporary solution for the following, particular problem: “Users cannot delete an object because it has dependencies, but they don’t know how to retrieve this information in the app”. That’s why we only support returning dependants of an object, and skip the rest (relevant) APIs.
In case you want to have a list of dashboards, please help us upvote this topic: API to List Dashboards. We will prioritize considering suggestions that have the most vote.