As much as I can see why people do not like this, I can see a lot of logic in William's approach.
To add to what David said, some of this is historical. The 100 packages sage builds now are unwieldy, but it was not always so. Earlier distributions contained much less, and shipping them all seemed like a reasonable trade for "build anywhere". It's worked surprisingly well, and we are attached to it now.
A thought occurs -- perhaps we could have sage .spkg packages that in fact are just dummies that really use the system libraries. That might provide a transition path to mixed .spkg/system libraries.
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