This is just a thought, but...

Why not have the linker use linker argument files? Essentially
libc.a would actually contain a list of library components to be
linked against (which would be separate shlibs).

Ex: libc.def would contain:
----
#ld                                              (magic cookie)
/usr/lib/libdb.so
/usr/lib/libgen.so
/usr/lib/libstring.so
/usr/lib/libi386.so
[...]
/usr/lib/libgcc.a                                (if necessary)
----

Then the linker would react to `-lc' as reading the definition file,
and linking against the specified libraries.

This way we don't need 23 different library specifications, and yet
we can keep library version numbers low.

There could also be a full X lib definition that automagically included
libX{aw,rm,t,11}.so, perhaps...

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