Thank you. It's really helpful to hear how others approach an issue. My backup plan, I think, will be MATE, although I'm still on the fence... It isn't fair to Cinnamon, because it's probably due to my older kvm-qemu and video support. I'll look for a live cd option and try it.
I like KDE except for the PIM, Social, DE/Search, so that leaves I guess the Plasma desktop.
I've been able to disable/remove/get rid of them so far. I don't use Activities, but rather xwindows virtual desktops. I'm probably going to use lightdm. I like the application launcher/menu and personal settings dialog. With my limited MATE usage, I found I occasionally had to use dconf for a setting; Not familiar with the tool, file layout, no doc found, it was sort of a hunt and peck method to find the applicable setting. I know that's a lot of KDE that I'm not using. The only app that I have not found a replacement for is Kate. It has been my main GUI text editor. It was super easy to create a syntax highlighting file for a markup language and basically all my text support files use it. Kate was crippled for a while, but they fixed most of the problems.
I did look for desktop search in settings, and I didn't find it. It seems Linux Mint doesn't install it by default --- which for my environment is a good thing. After the install, I went to install update (icon in tray) and saw it in the list. I unchecked it. Akonadi really seems to be stuck, but I thought if you didn't use any KDE PIM's you could get rid of it. I do use the digital clock but I turn off events.
You are right about time. I do feel I'm spending more time uninstalling stuff now than a few years ago, so I'm looking for a balance. Part of this is getting use to dpkg, apt, Synaptic, and the package philosophy. Sometimes when I looked at removing a package, the additional packages that were going to be removed included a meta package (mint-meta-kde or mint-mata-codecs). What are the ramifications down the line if those are removed?
When I installed Lightdm, the dialog said "37 packages will be held back and not upgraded", 1 will be installed. Is this information or does it require action?
In all, I am looking forward to the LTS of Linux Mint 17.1.