I'll admit that it's a totally different take on the answer to this but, like many things, I find that the built in functionality is just totally bloated and would probably never use it. I'll write my own, instead.
If I am reading this right, it makes sense considering what I use from the system tables on a regular basis it would be reasonable to create views or functions to eliminate the redundant code I seem to write.
My bad, Lynn.... I was talking about graph tables and not things like sys.columns, etc.