Linux have couple of main brands, at least Debian, Redhat and Slackware families.
Distro success depend mainly for development group "quality". Redhat and Debian used to be "best dev groups" distroes, but later Redhat was sold for some company. Slackware is one of the most solids, almoust the oldest and most unixlike, but is mentally limited for that "automatic package dependency maintenance is wrong" -thing. All these main distro families are polluted by gigantism.
Of course, others problems with all unix brands (=unixdisease) are ISO-layer model and sick unix filestructure idealism. And the crown of all mess is that unix non-realtime-no-exeptionhandling stuff, whick ruins it at least something still survive.
There are few interesting experiments to fix unixdisease, bogolinux for example. Bogo is "too radical", you have to live with those myriads lines of histrically written unix code.
TinyCore is brilliant trade off with dirty unix history and healthy code. All code is minimalized, and sick unix filestructure is "isolated" by TC format. For orninary user TC's the biggest advantage is "application evolution", there is vast selection of linux tools (and most of them are bad) but all "TC staff apps" are light, fast, simple and pro.
Unfortynatelly TC is still under development, but becouse main development priciples are VERE healthy, TC will be ready on some day at near future.
Edit: Gobolinux, not bogo (bogogobogo-whatever-anyway)