I think I see what's going on here in regards to locale's and gnome-terminal (which I don't need).
Even though I have set my locale in 3 places (en_US.UTF-8) in
1) grub.cfg kernel line
2) exported in my .profile as LANG
3) exported in my .profile as a fallback with LANGUAGE
(and seen as accepted by the colorful boot stanza)
Upon reboot, gnome-terminal - and in fact xterm when fed with invalid font choices on purpose - throws locale errors, means that I have to go online to get the package to generate locales first. And gnome-terminal still bombs out, despite en_US.UTF-8 being set.
What appears to be the case is that if a user desires to grab the gnome-terminal package on her own, she would be pulling down the entire gnome desktop, or a large amount of unwanted material as an Ubuntu meta desktop package.
dCore's gnome-terminal seems to be cherry-picked to only require the user to go online and get the locales utility to get it to work - and not pull down the entire desktop.
Other things, like the adwaita icons and perhaps even ubuntu.mono may be an attempt to support gnome-terminal too.
I don't know - since it doesn't work without having to go online to generate locales, and dCore is already at 365mb, heck why not just make it work out of the box (for xterm too!) by making the distribution 370mb? I mean, at this point what's the concern about size? Put locales in there so it works out of the box.
Maybe dump things like the bsd utils, or something else to compensate that can be picked up if someone truly wants it by going online?
Not mad, just puzzling since I don't need gnome-terminal at all, but to each his own.