I'd argue that is more a symptom of applying the UNIX philosophy, if anything. A lot of those "hundred KDE packages" are very tiny, highly modular libraries tha

I'd argue that is more a symptom of applying the UNIX philosophy, if anything. A lot of those "hundred KDE packages" are very tiny, highly modular libraries that do "one thing". And no, the apps don't depend on the shell. In fact it's often the distros asking us to go a bit more monolithic again to ease the packaging overhead.