The thing I don't like about KDE is that it is that KDE apps aren't individual components but part of a large framework. Anytime I go to install a KDE app on Arch, it wants to install like 30+ packages and unnecessary apps with it and I just end up finding something more lighter weight that doesn't have any or only a couple dependencies and it usually ends up performing a lot better.
The apps are already individual things that don't depend on each other, except in some cases where KParts are used. A KPart is kind of like an application turned into a library. Usually, this is not something users need to be concerned about. The integrated terminal in the Dolphin file manager is a Konsole KPart. openSUSE (and probably others like Fedora and Ubuntu) actually split Konsole into `konsole` and `konsole-part`, so it's not a problem.
That sounds like an Arch packaging issue, a misunderstanding of what the packages actually do or you're installing a metapackage and not realizing it.
Before we had a big libraries called kdelibs and kdepimlibs and people would complain that they were too big and so nobody outside of KDE would use them.
Now we split everything, and people complain that they are too many libraries. There is no way to make everyone happy. Note that all this packages are very small and all provides features you really want to have.
