I'm a big fan of the plasma workspace for KDE, and of the desktop environment itself. However, I myself personally am not a big fan of all the bundled software that comes with it. (Ironic that I actually wrote some userbase wiki pages for Kontact)

However, I'd like to know, can you have just have the eye candy of Plasma Desktop without everything else like kdepim, kde-games, etc?

Or is it an all or nothing deal?

I have nothing against the bundled software, I actually consider it quite powerful and efficient, however it's just not for me. Previously on another box I deleted kde-games, but this process of manually deleting kde components one by one doesn't appeal to me.

Is what I'm asking possible? Can one simply have plasma without k-everything?

I'm pretty sure it would be possible, probably easier in slackware since it doesn't manage dependencies. I installed gnome panel into xfce in debian, using aptitude. I specifically told it to leave out some dependencies i didn't think it would need; some are obvious, like gnome-session, while other's weren't. It worked eventually. I have little experience out of debian based distros, and it can be quite hard to install bare minimal packages because of apt's and to a lesser extent, dpkg's package managing. I've probably gone off a little, but to answer your question. I'm pretty sure it's possible, but you may have to experiment a little till you get it the way you want it, so maybe you might want to fiddle in a vm first.

I believe it is possible, yes, but I haven't done and I can't recall any specific guides.

What OS and packaging system do you want / prefer? Say you wanted to use Ubuntu + apt, you could install ubuntu-server or ubuntu-minimal and then add plasma-desktop - taking note of its dependencies. Just don't install kde-desktop or kubuntu-desktop because those packages will pull in chunks of the KDE Software Compilation.

Be aware that KWin, the window manager, and Plasma Desktop are different sets of packages, though I'm pretty sure Plasma depends on KWin.

Just checked the kubuntu repo, and according to that, kwin is not a dependency of plasma-desktop, and i'm not surprised as you can very easily run kwin with other desktop environments, which i do by the way in xfce; and also you can easily do the opposite and run other window managers in kde, like compiz for example.