Getting only the most recent bookmark?

So, I was thinking I’d use WordPress’ Bookmarks/Links content type to populate a slider…

…Except there are a grand total of four functions interacting with this part of WordPress.

I don’t think you can even access these with a WP_Query object, and it seems all date-related data attached to these is in relation to the last update of the link itself (I.e., when the linked-to page is updated).

Is there any way to even retrieve only the most recently-added bookmark?

(For more of a semi-related discussion question for the comments — if this aspect of WP is so woefully underdeveloped 3 versions of the CMS in, why not just farm out this functionality to a plugin? Simply backwards compatibility?)

As far as I know it’s not possible to query the links directly, but there is definetly a link_updated field in the wp_links table, so you can use wpdb to interact with it and return the latest (modified) links.

There’s also a solution here.

EDIT : Updating a link doesn’t change link_updated, but here is a plugin that can solve that : Link Updated Plugin

Auttomatically update the link_updated field when adding or editing a
link, so you can use Links as a linklist.

EDIT 2 : If using the Links/Bookmarks functionality is too much of a hassle, as it seems it’s really not as flexible as posts, you could also create a custom post type or a post format for Bookmarks and work with that.