New Debian leader seeks more innovation within project (ITWire)

>some dependencies must be met before the package installation can begin, others can be deferred until a later stage. This makes it easier to avoid dependency loops

To expand on this: dpkg's principal purpose is more of an internal utility used by packaging tools which handle the dependency resolution. Using dpkg to install packages manually should not be recommended for anyone who doesn't already know how to deal with that, as they're working at a lower than intended level of abstraction.

If you have a .deb which you want to install and have the dependencies checked and resolved for you (assuming they're satisfiable), you would be better off with gdebi. Despite the name, it is not just a Gnome application but also has command-line and KDE interfaces available.