In my experience, using Aptitude to make everything as auto-installed and than marking just the meta-packages you need does a pretty good job for removing the bulk of the bloat. One downside is that, even if you have Aptitude configured to not autoinstall recommends, it won't autoremove recommends. Do note that if you start manually removing packages, an important package might have to be added to your list of manually installed packages to avoid it being autoremoved(for example, at some point a linked dependency that kept busybox from being autoremoved got removed and now I have to mark busybox as manually installed to keep my system so it will boot to the Adriane Menu with speech in-tact). For what it's worth, I've only got 476 packages installed on my primary workstation and could get rid of another 200 if I could find a suitable text-mode replacement for Iceweasel. Then again, I'm far from a typical user and have basically gutted my xserver to the point it would be useless to a sighted user.