Which is better: "Filters and Variables" vs "Results of another analysis"

Summary:

Are hidden dashboard prompts better than getting the results of another analysis?

Content (required):

When building dashboards, we occasionally have a need for filtering on attributes that don't exist. As an example, we want to prompt the user for a year but deliver the monthly/quarterly/yearly trend data based on the years selected by the user. When we asked the community for ideas on improving performance, we were advised to have a separate analysis that received the year and delivered the Calendar Month End Date and have the actual analysis filter the calendar month end date based on the results of that analysis.