> This strategy may fail insofar as you may acquire in the course of installing Okular some of the second third order deps which by default in most systems won't be removed even if you remove Okular itself. You would then conclude erroneously that you had to install fewer extra things because you already have it.

This makes sense. Completely forgot about this part. What an idiot I am.

> The situation remains that basically the first KDE app if you have nothing KDE/QT is 2GB the second and subsequent are 10MB. Honestly with storage costing almost nothing per GB and very limited developer resources this isn't a terrible design. Spending something you don't have in order to save people are resource none of them are going to care about doesn't seem like a great investment.

It does makes sense. In a way. But this isn't about space though. To me being in a rolling distro, it just adds weights for package breakage. Especially since GNOME and KDE changes a lot of stuff more often. Not to mention, with all the OSS activism going on and security issues, it is always better to have the least possible dependencies. Whatever is unnecessary for the default package could be optional dependencies always. Prevention is better than cure. Right? :)