I'll answer random things I read in the thread. First, I don't think the "lightweight" part of the philosophy is about using stock packages, as that's implied in the KISS philosophy, you don't need to stress it any more than that. The same KISS philosophy says one should try to avoid complexity whenever possible. Lastly, any decision taken will hurt someone. You keep the features? Then the ones who want the lighter, simpler kernel will suffer from a less tested build. You drop them? Servers (and any other user, whatever reason) will suffer from the same. However, the code paths they use exclusively are really not tested more by being in the main repos. Why? Because the ones using it, use it through AUR packages. If the feature is unusable without AUR packages, then they effectively get testing only from the ones who install AUR packages. Sure, they have some extra guarantee that drivers are not broken (except if they behave differently under AppArmor, SELinux, etc, do they?), but they don't have any testing on the actual features that are being included only because they use them. Needless to say, I'm all in favor of using minimal builds by default.
