If you're going to go to the bother of installing new packages in your "ideal distro" then why can't you remove old ones also?
Most distros give an alternate install for another desktop environment and if you choose your favorite all you have to do then is remove a few extraneous applications though, as snowpine points out, having a few extra applications doesn't cause any problems.
The only problem caused by a couple of extra packages is disk space and seeing as how I have had Debian with XFCE and Gnome installed on a 4GB drive I doubt that's much of an issue for most people.

The Slax project (which was in facr a Live-CD project) is dormant since 2009, so what you see is really KDE 3.5. Since it is not actively developed anymore (read: no bugfixes, no security updates) I would recommend to rather use its successor Porteus.

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Noted. I'm also looking at the Slackware variant called Absolute.

Shoot...it's all because of one particular decision by MEPIS that I'm going through this distro upheaval. MEPIS 7 was the first distro I completely had the hang of, and for a long time after that, my Linux life was hunky-dory. Then, as KDE 3.5 became deprecated, the MEPIS designers decided to retain its successor, the substantially different KDE 4, as the desktop manager for MEPIS 11. That was realistically the end for MEPIS and me. The way things are going, it might also be the end of my seven years of using only Debian-based distros.