Unfortunately redhat based distros don't support keeping the install minimal past installing the first few things afterwards. There is no --no-instal-recommends --no-install-suggests for RPM based distros and no (easy) way to acheive that either.

It's for this reason that I have, over the past year, discovered that my favorite server OS is debian minimal (with those above flags entered into apt.conf) while my favorite desktop is without a doubt Fedora / gnome3.

This is exactly the opposite of the norm I think, but, fedora pushes the desktop boundaries far further than ubuntu and debian is so highly optimised for minimal server setups.