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This example is kind of unfair for two reasons:

1. Konqueror is basically the Swiss army knife of KDE. No wonder it pulls in everything and the kitchen sink.

2. You present an intimidatingly large package list to make your point, but that list is that long 'because KDE Frameworks (formerly known as kdelibs) is now deliberately packaged in a lot of tiny pieces to reduce the amount of libraries that an average application needs to pull in.

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I always saw these tons of little packages as a bad idea as they make package management (from the user's perspective) harder, they do not really provide any space benefit (code is small), if anything they make loading slower (i wrote a benchmark some time ago and a binary linked against a single dynamic library with tons of exports was faster to load than a binary linked against several dynamic libraries with fewer exports - but overall the same number of imports) and AFAIK the OS wont keep the entire library in memory anyway if it isn't needed (if anything the extra housework needed to all the libraries are probably a net negative). And of course these intimidating lists.

And in practice applications do not use one or two of them, they use several of them and those libraries bring in several others, etc like spaghetti (so you have Konsole relying on Phonon as mentioned in another reply).

Well you can try the same with konsole. On my XFCE system it wants to install 71 packages, including stuff that a terminal emulator probably doesn't need like phonon. To be fair, this could also be due to Debian's packaging and it may well be possible to have a leaner konsole package.

The Phonon dependency probably comes via libknotify.

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