Bug#608913: closed by Jeremy Bícha <jeremy.bicha at canonical.com> (Re: don't make desktop-base mandatory, cause it sucks)

[Harald Dunkel]

I am not sure if this is still relevant, because this ticket is
  >13 years old and package dependencies and contents have changed,
but IMHO you missed the point.

The eye-candy is surely important for Canonical, but in general I
would recommend to give the Debian users the freedom to get rid of
it, if they want to. The Recommended packages are still installed
by default, so there is no real harm.

Anyway, I highly appreciate your work on Debian.

Regards
Harri