I indeed don’t have the slightest idea what you want to do. I thought I did but it’s getting more and more confusing.
You want to “start from scratch” but also a “cut down” version. You want to build it easily on any distro and make it simpler at the same time. And you quote an article that talks about how hard it is to deploy apps on Linux Desktop that discusses start up times and graphics drivers, which all seem pretty irrelevant to me.
For now I am sticking to my first response (which has been ignored so far)
and what @pfaffman says is very true indeed