I don't know. While I commonly use several of these it feels like this easily bleeds into questions of subjective "taste" and domain-specific libraries. If you

I don't know. While I commonly use several of these it feels like this easily bleeds into questions of subjective "taste" and domain-specific libraries. If you're not changing anything else about the management of these packages, what's the advantage of having request or express as part of the "standard" library? And if you are changing the management of these packages, then maybe that's the solution with or without expanding the core library? I think that Java for example has similar defacto-but-not-actual "standard libraries" that correspond to many of these domains. I'm not convinced that a larger "core" is addressing the root problem.