I fear that this discussion might have veered too far into
theoretical territory for some of the conversants, and probably not the
_same_ theoretical territory for everyone. With that in mind, I *think*
that what Lynn Winebarger is asking for might be best answered by:

Try digging into the package-quickstart part of package, especially
> p-q-refresh and p-q-maybe-refresh.


On the other hand, I think that the best answer to "should emacs-devel
actually care about loading scads of packages" might be:

There seem to be a lot of (potential) emacs users, especially in the
> "interested but not already heavily enfranchised subset", that make use of
> emacs "distributions", and that model would probably benefit from
> improvements to "loading scads of packages".


This doesn't answer the "should" question, but I think it provides a
closer-to-real-practice basis for consideration.

Hope that helps,
~Chad