Changing field type in MDA Error

There are a few similar posts out but wanted to put this one to internal. One big thing I have dealt with recently is having to change field data types in MDA objects. If I'm not mistaken, we used to be able to change field types without deleting dependencies, just deleting data which wasn't too bad. Now, from everything I've seen, you have to delete any dependency which can really cause problems. This includes reports, rules, and S3 jobs in all of my situations which leads to a ton of rework. These can be pretty time consuming to rebuild. 

As other posts have said, it would also be nice to delete fields all together.