It may sound like religious point of view, but I strongly believe that developers is the number one priority to support with Spectrum OS now — as easier and friendlier the OS will be to the developer as faster it will be delivered to the common users. It, from my point of view, includes two main aspects — ease of development giving the developer proper “bricks” (well encapsulated OS services) and examples, that coveres main use cases/use patterns of the operating system.
Yes, that's a compelling argument. I wonder if it would make sense to add some special configuration option for development, that would enable extra development tools and other goodies? (I often find myself adding strace…)
(I think they probably shouldn't be present by default, because then it could be difficult to be sure nothing was depending on them in future when it came time to remove them. But something that any given developer could set once and then always have developer stuff available, and toggle off when they wanted to test a production build, could make things a lot nicer.)
Well, one could have VM generator functions, so that you can easily generate a development-like VM or a reasonable-setup like VM or minimal VM (without D-Bus etc.), and so the developers can just use the dev version and always get the good stuff included?
And BTW, thanks so much for spending all this time engaging with this stuff! The project will be much better off for your efforts. :)