When I was taking classes in Hellenistic Greek lo these many years ago, I strongly suspected that the whole notion of “deponency” was bogus. The traditional way of teaching Greek voice has active, middle and passive voices. Unfortunately, not only are the “middle” and “passive” paradigms identical for some tenses, there are some verbs that have gaps in the active part of the paradigm, and yet are used in ways that in English would require active voice (the King James preserves this in constructions like “he was come”) — these verbs are called “deponent”, meaning “these verbs don’t fit our native habits and so we will invent an entirely imaginary category for them”.
I just stumbled on a paper by Carl Conrad laying out the difficulties with this idea and proposing a different way of thinking, that the distinction should be between active and “subject-focused”, and that verbs in the traditional “middle/passive” paradigms should be considered middles unless it is clear — usually from the presence of an explicit instrument or agent — that the sense is passive.
Ironically, many European languages work this way — consider the French reflexive forms, which are more often middle in meaning than passive.
Amen, brother!