Thanks for the feedback. Sorry to reply to my own post, but I'me serious about taking on this endeavor. I came up with an idea that should take care of at least the external program dependency part.
1. Pushed all of executable files within a given directory structure into an array.
2. Parse each script contained in the crontab. If we have a match, push the match into a HoL, where key = script name, value = dependencies.