Yes I do care. Apparently I wasn't Cc'd on that thread so I wasn't even
aware that patch existed. It would be very nice if you could bump the
thread to me (unless there's a way to retrieve it from patchwork that I
didn't find?)

Sadly, I can't send the whole thread. I thought a had a local archive
collected via gmane, but it seems this is not as complete as I hoped for
:( You can download the patch itself as mbox, however. Check the upper
right corner of the patchwork page. Or search for "mbox".

If we only want *one* I2C block read at a specified offset then i2cget
seems more appropriate indeed.

I don't have a clear opinion here. On the one hand, if we want just one
block read, this is more a "get" than a "dump". On the other hand,
i2cdump already has a range-parameter. So, from a user perspective,
keeping i2cget to single values and update the range parameter in
i2cdump might be least confusing?