^ Edit: thank you for the praise man! 
I feel you, and totally agree that if they ever find the resources to truly work on dashboard there's a potential for breakage BUT I truly don't believe that will happen soon, it'll be one of the last things they work on once caught up on other things. also, the breakage would be soo minimal, because smartly mods are mostly css and some basic JS 
I commend you for considering thinking about taking on a build-from-scratch, as others have tried. I've heard the builder api (I forget the name) is useable, but I don't understand why some of the options that are using it are soo limited..
