Your approach of expanding the extension to include path lookup is a good starting point and can be relatively quick to implement. However, there are some established patterns in software design that might provide more robust and scalable solutions for your centralized dependency management problem. Here are a few suggestions:

• Observer Pattern with Hierarchical Subject: This is similar to your hierarchical dispatching idea. Implement a hierarchical subject (the form) where each element is both an observer and a subject. When a change occurs, it notifies its parent, which then notifies its own observers. This naturally handles scoping and closest-match scenarios.
• Pub/Sub with Namespaces: Use a publish-subscribe system where topics are namespaced according to the element's path. Subscribers can listen to specific namespaces or use wildcards for broader subscriptions. This approach is flexible and can easily handle complex dependency scenarios.
• Dependency Injection Container: Create a DI container that manages dependencies based on both name and path. This centralizes dependency resolution and can be easily extended to handle complex scoping rules.

Your path-based resolution ideais actually quite close to these established patterns, particularly the Pub/Sub with Namespaces approach. It's a good direction that can be expanded upon.

For a quick implementation that can be expanded later, I would suggest starting with your path-based resolution approach. It's straightforward to implement and aligns well with your current structure. You can then evolve this into a more robust Pub/Sub or Observer system as your needs grow.

To implement this:

1. Modify your dependency extraction to include the full path of each dependency.
2. Create a central registry that maps full paths to elements.
3. When registering listeners, use the full path instead of just the name.
4. When notifying, traverse up the path to find the closest matching dependency.

This approach allows you to start simple and gradually introduce more complex patterns as needed, while addressing your immediate concerns about scoped dependency lookup.