stop sign is an interesting thought, does definitely represent that the issue is blocked... although it feels like a very visually heavy emoji to use, and if we use a color to represent issue state later on Stop Sign is similar to Red Circle and might get visually confusing. 

and yeah, that's exactly what i'm envisioning - i'd like to be able to see at a glance that an issue has dependencies. it might be nice to see the state of those dependencies? but that starts to feel off in the weeds. for now just seeing the count would be nice i think.