When using a lamp gauge, is appears that the elements are always being rendered on the top of the dynamic layer, regardless of whether or not the dynamic box is selected for the element. Also, image elements are always ending up on top of text elements and hiding them, even when the text element is selected for dynamic and the image element is not. Is there a solution to this that I am missing?

You are correct in the behavior you are seeing. At the moment, all elements in a lamp gauge are always "dynamic". This causes them to always be on top of the "static" elements. Be mindful of how much is being drawn using lamp gauges due to this fact as too much "dynamic" drawing can affect performance of the system.

Unfortunately, the checkbox for dynamic in lamp elements (images and text) is currently ignored and was mistakenly brought over from normal ImageWidgets and TextWidgets, which do adhere to that flag.

I'm not sure why image elements in the lamp gauge would always be ending up on top of text elements, however, there isn't any ordering imposed by multiple lamp elements enabled at the same time and this ordering could be different than expected and possibly why you always see the images show up on top. If you need to show text on top of images, you could use 2 lamp gauges set to the same variable, one with your images and one with your text and try sending the one with images to the back to see if a correct ordering can be imposed. I'm not 100% sure that will work, but it might.

I've decided to use image widgets and just hide / view them in the program.