Perhaps there's a slightly more open-minded individual that would like to comment. I mean, is Synaptic gone nuts or are there really that much missing dependencies? Heck, everything I've tried so far works great.

This is actually the nicest running distro on my old PIII 500 I've tried. It's running better than DSL, Vector, Antix and of course Mepis full. But if it's incomplete beyond a practical effort to repair it, I guess I need to keep trying distros...