compliation failure of minimal latex documents

[Karl Berry]

    I'm thinking specifically of the recent oberdiek

FYI, for every package split from oberdiek, I have looked at every
\usepackage, \RequirePackage, etc. in the TL tree to get an idea of
where it is used, and chosen the collection accordingly. I've surely
made suboptimal assignments sometimes, but "lack of attention" is not
what happened.  If you have a bug about a specific package to report,
report it.

In general, your desire to have an installation as "trim as possible",
while understandable, means you are going to run into these issues from
time to time. Maybe you'd be happier with MiKTeX and have the necessary
packages installed on the fly. --karl