Not only this but I need the freedom to control the dependency list for an effect. Sometimes it isn't as simple as "every variable being referenced inside the effect."

that's a bit confusing. While you can sometimes get away with leaving out dependencies, and then you don't have to useMemo or useCallback as often, it seems like there is a much larger downside to having potentially stale values in your effect. Leaving them out to me would result in the potential for weird future bugs and race conditions.