I'm sure that there's going to be plenty of dissent on this, but Arch is a pretty simple distro and attempts to keep packages as vanilla as possible. Their wiki

I'm sure that there's going to be plenty of dissent on this, but Arch is a pretty simple distro and attempts to keep packages as vanilla as possible. Their wiki is also an awesome resource (I find myself using it even when troubleshooting things on non-Arch systems, to great effect). It's definitely not a one-click deployment, and they've made some design decisions I'm not a fan of, but as far as simple systems go, they're on a great track.