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The quantity of packages that exist at 162150 seems to say to me that there's a great many more than what are "necessary" for the operating system to exist.

sudo apt-cache stats

Total package names: 162150 (5189 k) Total package structures: 145852 (6417 k) Normal packages: 69505 Pure virtual packages: 1169 Single virtual packages: 64848 Mixed virtual packages: 355 Missing: 9975 Total distinct source versions: 71172 (1708 k) Total distinct versions: 71172 (6334 k) Total distinct descriptions: 139719 (3353 k) Total dependencies: 435057/121405 (10.6 M) Total ver/file relations: 73378 (1174 k) Total Desc/File relations: 142692 (2283 k) Total Provides mappings: 70533 (1693 k) Total globbed strings: 268430 (6560 k) Total slack space: 77.3 k Total space accounted for: 47.0 M Total buckets in PkgHashTable: 196613 Unused: 93545 Used: 103068 Utilization: 52.4218% Average entries: 1.4151 Longest: 19 Shortest: 1 Total buckets in GrpHashTable: 196613 Unused: 86025 Used: 110588 Utilization: 56.2465% Average entries: 1.46625 Longest: 7 Shortest: 1

162k vs millions. That's not even getting into package update velocity, authorship, the totally divergent goals, etc. I just think it's utterly pointless to compare.