Hi
Lately this is becoming a trend. howl and howl-libs are must-have for GNOME (and bunch of other packages), and soon will become must-have for KDE.
what is bloat for you is a must have feature for many others. this is progress. many people consider anything more featureful than fluxbox as bloat. doesnt mean gnome can afford NOT to add features to stay competitive.
NetworkManager now requires bind and caching-nameserver. And
those are just the few discussed on this mailing list in last couple of days.
this one probably can be improved.