Yeah, I guess there’s no where to go from there. 
I thought the best thing about Yaz was Alison Moyet’s voice.
I think it depends on the context. Compared to other “synth” bands? Well do you include all forms of electronica or just pop-synth? DM has cred in the pop music world. I place them in the same class as Erasure, Art of Noise, Eurythmics, et al. They helped make electronic music more accessible and were/are immensely successful and popular. but moving into hardcore, trans, hip-hop, ambiance, industrial, EBM, noise, trip-hop, etc., Depeche Mode becomes quaint and about as deep as a candy dish. Depeche Mode are to Skinny Puppy/Vangelis/Merzbow/Thievery Corporation, what Josie and the Pussycats are to Led Zeppelin. (ok, that’s harsh, maybe not Josie, more like Styx) Btw, I enjoy DM, they craft interesting, melodic, catchy and sometimes pretty songs. cred? not much, but they’re still fun.
That’s the first time in the history of mankind that anyone has ever listed Vangelis and Merzbow right next to each other in a list of examples.
By the way, and I probably sound snobby when I say this, but no serious fan of electronic music has ever used the term “electronica” seriously. It’s a term created by MTV in the 90s when they were trying to push electronic music on people as the next big thing. It’s really quite meaningless and has no genre-defining boundaries.
Their experimental stuff on UaE did reclaim much of the respect they lost for having such lightweight-if-good-and-catchy stuff, but they further lost respectibility points for having a song complaining about fashion and/or the music business, which as I have hypothesized, is ironically much more common in pop music. (People who don’t actually listen to the critics don’t have to prove it.)
Peter Gabriel could well be considered a “synth” act, and he’s definitely got some cred, as they say.