For me it's not about the size, it's about the understanding. I'd really like to understand what everything on my system does and why it's there. It seems impossible with modern systems. Back in the '90s I needed a secure email relay - it had lilo, kernel, init, getty, bash, vi, a few shell utils (before busybox..), syslogd and sendmail. I'm not sure any more as it was a long time ago, but I think I even statically linked everything so there was no libc. I liked that system.