There are plenty of light distributions - TinyCore; LFS; Arch; Gentoo; and so on.
"Interactive installs" are not great for users. You end up with dependency hell; or users aren't clueful about the difference between a KDE and Gnome environment. Sane defaults, and allowing people to uninstal stuff, are better for most users.
There are other distributions which claim to be small, and which are cut down versions of Ubuntu (usually) but which are actually quite large. See, for example eeebuntu (now called auroraos) which installed a bunch of OpenOffice language stuff, but not OO itself.
"Interactive installs" are not great for users. You end up with dependency hell; or users aren't clueful about the difference between a KDE and Gnome environment. Sane defaults, and allowing people to uninstal stuff, are better for most users.
There are other distributions which claim to be small, and which are cut down versions of Ubuntu (usually) but which are actually quite large. See, for example eeebuntu (now called auroraos) which installed a bunch of OpenOffice language stuff, but not OO itself.