Perhaps I'm missing something, but deleting a device will also delete any dependencies, but isn't that a bit drastic? The other day I had to replace a failed relay which had multiple dependencies, which I didn't want deleted as I was going to replace the relay and have the dependencies use the new one. So I went into each trigger, control pages and changed it to something else until I could change it to the new one.
What about if Indigo created a placeholder item that one could then search and replace with the new one?
Thanks,
Simon