I actually have precisely one GUI application that I on the gateway machine: xcoral, my preferred editor. I run it over ssh, and it's built with nothing but Athena widgets, so it's light and fast. If I was going to use fwbuilder, I had no choice but to install it on the LX, because the LX is my only OpenBSD machine and fwbuilder doesn't include the pf plugin unless built on OpenBSD. There was nothing to indicate that it was going to be such a dependency pig, and frankly, there's no earthly reason why it needs to be. That's half my point. Half the software out there is linking in all this stuff not because it actually needs it, but just because it's there. Galeon was faster and more stable when it was a GTK+ application, before it became a Gnome one.
No-one's saying that a 386/16 with 24MB of memory should be able to run every latest whoosh-bang application. It's just that I see the paradigm of maximal feature set even for things that don't actually need it taking us towards a situation where it takes just as much hardware to useably run the GUI required to run any "current" Linux software as it does to run Windows. And that, I think, will be a bad thing.
Re: gnome and other desktop environments
No-one's saying that a 386/16 with 24MB of memory should be able to run every latest whoosh-bang application. It's just that I see the paradigm of maximal feature set even for things that don't actually need it taking us towards a situation where it takes just as much hardware to useably run the GUI required to run any "current" Linux software as it does to run Windows. And that, I think, will be a bad thing.