Ton Roosendaal started out as a programmer on the Amiga. I'm probably somewhat biased here, but I expect that he has strong feelings about avoiding bloatware
That's apparently also why blender had such unusual UX (like right click to select) - it's rooted in Amiga conventions.
I think it would be a good use of space to include some default assets (models, textures, etc.) for beginners to play with, even if it doubled the size of the download