The trick is that there is no actual definition of minimal, so you can always add it to your list of adjectives and sound more hip as a result. Another good one is "clean".
We try and help you keep it clean. Check out https://github.com/feathersjs/feathers-chat to see what our idea of an app should look like. Obviously, different strokes for different folks, but that's the kind of code we like.
Express claims to be a "Fast, unopinionated, minimalist web framework for Node.js" so we decided that minimal fits well because Feathers at it's core is just a very small extension to and in the spirit (or so we'd like to think ;) of Express.