This reminds me of discussion the Postnuke-Community had 10 years ago. They started a fork in 2005 iirc: Postnuke 0.8 which became Zikula 1.0 - a total rewrite and a core without modules. You are able to assemble just the function you need. Its based on Symphony now. From a developer perspective, it's a great piece of Software, but they lost most of their community to Joomla and Wordpress because they offer a lot of stuff out of the box... it seems, history is repeating.