I think the discussion is drifting in the wrong direction. As far as I as an individual user of LaTeX am concerned, things are fine. If I need something, I can find it in teTeX, if it's not there, I'll get it from CTAN. No problem. The question is only: What packages are necessary for author-author and author-publisher document exchange (in all fields in which LaTeX is used)? I, as the author of a scientific article, want to be sure that if I stick to certain conventions (which may be well be much narrower than the whole of CTAN), any reasonable publisher will process my manuscript without delay (and screwups due to retyping, the publisher not knowing about amsmath, etc.). The publisher will probably also want the same guidelines in order to reject the screwy stuff for electronic submission, thus giving the author an "incentive" to submit reasonable files. This, however, cannot work unless a base of packages is defined (if the base is too narrow, authors will do screwy things out of desperation), and UNLESS IT IS WELL DOCUMENTED, which, as far as the practical problems go, is problem number one (perhaps on the same level as the frontmatter stuff). Marcel