The thing is also in the default pack of apps. Say you want a light text editor. Which one do you use? If you select a gnome based one on a kde desktop, you mig

The thing is also in the default pack of apps. Say you want a light text editor. Which one do you use? If you select a gnome based one on a kde desktop, you might pull all of kde libs ! So the pack of light image viewer, notepad, calculator form a mini coherent set (a "distribution") that fits well together, but does not justify a full on packaging of kernel, glibc ... hence flavours, not packages or distros.