I've always thought a good compromise between these approaches, and for a while it kinda looked like at least Rubinius would go to something like it in the Ruby

I've always thought a good compromise between these approaches, and for a while it kinda looked like at least Rubinius would go to something like it in the Ruby world (but efforts to modularize the ruby stdlib seem to have fizzled somewhat), would be to have a minimal stdlib but a broader set of basically LTS versions of exceptional packages, where they are expected to have important issues backported to a stable version alongside a version of the runtime itself. This would still allow for pulling up to the bleeding edge, or simply not using, of some of those blessed packages if you choose to by specifying them in the cargo manifest, but would still provide guidance on basic useful packages. I think it'd also be easier to boot stale packages in new releases (ie. the eternal security fail that is the yaml lib in ruby's stdlib).