Clutter

Indeed.
As a gmail user, I am also annoyed I cannot fully remove all of ubuntu's evolution packages. I don't need an email client, no matter how many extras it has in it. I don't need nor want evolution taking over for my system calender. If anything, it should have been abstracted out into an independent library and evolution changed to rely on the library, instead of the bonehead move of "well, let's just depend on evolution, then".

Same with the mono dependencies that tomboy brought in.
I have nothing against mono, and rely on it daily on some boxes, but on others, tomboy isn't being used and nothing else depends on mono.

For an operating system that essentially embodies 'choice is everything', I find it extremely aggravating that my available choices are waning rapidly from a small number of silly design decisions that could have been avoided.

Most of my ubuntu boxes are administered graphically with freenx. Nautilus and it's network bookmarks make things easy. Many of them are VMs with a specific purpose. Often I just need the basics of gnome and go out of my way to trim down packages I'm not using. Firefox, Nautilus, gnome-panel, system-monitor-applet, system-tray-applet, and gnome-terminal are about all I need.

But the packages are set up for hard dependencies when in many cases a Suggests or Recommends is a better option.

The default package selections are a good middle ground for initial general desktop usage, and I'm not arguing they should be changed, but I justify every byte on my VMs if I can, so I should be able to remove nearly any application or applet package, and then follow up with an autoremove to wipe out the remaining library dependencies.

Hope they realize this stuff before Gnome 3.0 hits.