I still miss the old dashboard view so badly. It was awesome having multiple calculators and sticky notes one button press away without cluttering my desktop. They really botched it by letting it rot and not integrating it with the App Store.
The latest implementation with the desktop is... okay, but unnecessarily messy imo — I'm unclear why they can't do both kinds of views on macOS (On the desktop + full screen view like the classic dashboard), akin to a dedicated view on the left side of the Home Screen + Home Screen widgets on iOS.
I had a wonderful little widget that gave me the snow report for my local ski hill. Have yet to find anything that just worked that well. Current solution is a homemade telegram bot that messages me the report every morning.
Also, fwiw, there were always ways to break a dashboard widget out of dashboard and onto the desktop. And dashboard's precursor, konfabulator, had that from the beginning
The latest implementation with the desktop is... okay, but unnecessarily messy imo — I'm unclear why they can't do both kinds of views on macOS (On the desktop + full screen view like the classic dashboard), akin to a dedicated view on the left side of the Home Screen + Home Screen widgets on iOS.