It occurred to me that Chuck Swiger wrote in gmane.os.netbsd.general:
> I would dislike having perl integrated into the base; it's huge, it's 
> comparitively fragile, and chasing after Perl modules tends to require you to 
> update the installed perl fairly often.  Too much churn.

FreeBSD removed perl from base for these reasons.

> There's nothing wrong with lynx, but curl, wget, fetch, are all alternatives 
> which (some of them) are lighter in weight.

There's nothing wrong with a *lot* of packages, but that doesn't mean I think
they should be added to base just like that. The point is that being *useful*
and not too big/complex aren't really the most important reasons why they
should be added to base. Why lynx, in favour of links, elinks or w3m? 

When I install a NetBSD system, the very first packages I install are zsh
and screen - but that alone hardly suffices as an argument..