The 2gig TeXLive installation is quite an elephant. I often wish that I could just pick what I really needed; but that requires me to understand the dependency

The 2gig TeXLive installation is quite an elephant. I often wish that I could just pick what I really needed; but that requires me to understand the dependency of those packages and suspect the end solution may point to re-engineer the whole thing. Yesterday I independently had this resolution that I shall experiment using plain TeX + my own meta-layer macros and see how far I could go. The font installation and selection is something I wish to have a GUI interface as simple as a word drop-down. Maybe I should find/or make such simple tool (ideally it should load the .tex file and provide WYSIWYG interface). The edit-compile-debug cycle is the simple way of dealing with complexity. The text form (markup or code) decomposes the complexity into abstract parts that we can focus on one part a time and the feedback loop provides a progressive path to perfection. I believe at some point, programming skill should be as common just as literacy today, at which point this edit-compile-debug cycle will be accepted just as we learn to accept a book without pictures.