Minimalism is a concept which hardware engineers embrace almost instinctively, but sadly in the world of software it's rarely even present in the vocabulary.
The emphasis in practical computing today is to ride upon the shoulders of giants by reusing the work of others, which is a terrific idea in principle but can be a disaster when applied without checks and balances. It almost always results in cancerous growth of colossal monolithic applications, which is why so many software systems today are bloated beyond belief and become ever more flaky in proportion to their size, not to mention suffering from dependency hell.
We used to call this nightmare "The Software Crisis", the reason why "software bridges" collapse millions of times a day across the world, in contrast to the products of other branches of engineering where reliability is required, expected and achieved as a matter of course every day, not as the exception. The Software Crisis is rarely mentioned anymore, because we have lost the war, surrendered to complexity, and have no solution in sight. Software bridges continue to fall, ever faster.
How does this relate to Raspberry Pi? Not very strongly, except in the sense that in software, "smaller is better". 256MB is such a huge amount of memory that if any significant part of it is used to hold the program code of a monolithic application then that application is in crisis, whether it's admitted or not.
There isn't really any solution to this problem available at the present time. It would require a breakthrough in computing science to come up with a way of doing more with less, and then to force it upon a world which doesn't even realize that its pride and joy is actually an engineering disaster. That's not going to happen any time soon.
Morgaine.
