Could you describe the scenario you ran into where depends-on was not adequate and the before & after options helped?

This may be a result of my limited imagination but I'm having a hard time seeing where this is useful, and justifies the additional complexity. By complexity I don't mean the code so much, we can deal with that, but when configuring components the semantics of how depends-on, before, and after work together is messy. There are many possible 'invalid' permutations, like A depends-on B so would be after in the component order but B is set to be after A. With potential loops among multiple components it becomes even more complex, or rather there are even more invalid configuration scenarios (or perhaps valid depending on semantics yet to be defined). In general what should happen with those?

My preference would be to avoid those issues altogether by keeping this more simple, hence the initial question.