A nice fellow at Red Hat pointed out lorax to me as a thing that could make a smaller install.img/inst.stage2 file and provided me with some docs. Indeed, it works! Though I do see that in the upstream lorax project the templates already do a lot of that trimming down, and RHEL is 6 versions behind. I guess making specialized slimmed down versions of the installer for _every possible use case_ would be annoying to maintain... I think that because composer never really worked the way I wanted it and the fact that I had never really audited the installer's filesystem before it felt like this "project" was untennable.
I'll have to start reading the big doc about Customizing Anaconda, now things make a lot more sense after manually ripping out huge pieces of the installer, I'm still surprised it worked!
Here are my customized lorax templates. I'll be adding a script that generates OL/AL/RL versions of the PXE'able installer for servers.
Grace Hopper's lecture was posted recently and she immediately verbalized my feelings about this "industry" and how it relates to how poorly planned (paraphrasing) transportation has been. It kind of sucks when everything seems to start showing the same behaviors... I feel trapped! I find computers interesting and it's my job, but I feel like I can't let myself show the amount of "passion" for it that I would want because of all the badness.