Is Small Still Beautiful?

Orthogonality (or representational independence), not size, is the relevant criteria. Harmonic analysis is the appropriate comparison. While every complete basis can represent any function in the relevant function space, it is better at representing some than others; notably the functions which are a finite linear combination of the basis functions. So trigonometric series represent one kind of function very efficiently, wavelets another. It's similar with programming languages.

Of course the orthogonal core may be mostly of interest to the language implementer,as orthogonality should, in the most faithful sense of the word, make the implementation of one construct independent of implementing another construct, particularly in optimization.

The standard library should be comprehensive and well documented so that it's easy to (1) decide if there's a package that does what you want, and (2) work out how to use it. Simply documenting all the functions/methods on an API is not enough; documentation should start by saying what problems the module is trying to solve, then give some worked examples. If the worked examples don't give a bloody good idea of how to use it, then probably either the package is badly designed or the documentation badly written.

There are libraries in Python that I have given up on using simply because I've not been able to figure out how to use them.

Functional. Functions. And, the only important "Library" is a small and beautiful compiler which is invoked with a built-in function called compile that you can change, swap out and completely remove, of course. Anything else seems like big globs of crufty glue.