I personally would like to see a distribution have a mixed policy -- dynamic linking against core libraries that are part of the default / basic OS install, and

I personally would like to see a distribution have a mixed policy -- dynamic linking against core libraries that are part of the default / basic OS install, and static linking against low usage libraries. That way, you keep the "update one library package to fix a bunch of programs", yet you also reduce cross dependency issues by limiting the number of library packages a given program is dependant on.