[brixon]

Dependency weight is more a factor for maintenance than initial development.

The apps I write I have to support for many years, so this dependency weight does concern me. By dependency weight I am more referring to the breadth of authors/maintainers and not the actual amount of code. When working in the Java/.NET worlds you still deal with a ginormous amount of dependency code, but they are one maintainer that is funded. The downside of monolithic dependencies is lack of flexibility and vendor lock in.