Aha, fair enough. Your original complaint was around how things 'felt wrong', and mentioned layout of apps, menus, icon sizes, buttons, fonts etc -- all things

Aha, fair enough. Your original complaint was around how things 'felt wrong', and mentioned layout of apps, menus, icon sizes, buttons, fonts etc -- all things that are pretty easy to tweak using the System Settings. It sounds like what you actually struggled with is breaking your environment by doing odd things with the distribution, which is an entirely different problem. If you remove packages and ignore the warnings from your distro, you should expect unpredictable results. If you remove packages that don't incur a warning from your package manager, and the result is a broken system, then you should file a bug report with your distro. I see you recently switched to Debian, but you didn't indicate whether you tried KDE on that distro. I've been on Debian GNU/Linux + KDE since last century, so I can confirm that this combination 'works fine here'.