You should take a look at the gazelle-installer, that is what MX-Linux and antiX use.

They looked at the calamares installer and (when they looked at it) it required a lot of KDE dependencies which made the ISO much bigger for no gain in function.

Is this part of the joys of systemd uber alles?

The Buick 215 was not a high production engine and has been out of production for over 50 years, not a good thing for a budget friendly build.

If weight is that much of a concern would a V6 possibly be a better choice?
Also smaller to fit the engine bay easier.

Maybe a Ford 302 Windsor aka 5.0?
Smallest and lightest of the common V8s.
Common = retired budget friendly.
They have some very good 5 speeds for them too.

(Gearhead for decades, long before I went to computers)

Don't see why they would need that kind of money for this, as soon as any competent judge saw that there was a trademark that existed for over a decade Groupon would get thoroughly chewed out for lack of due diligence.
No long drawn out court case required.

Considering the Gnome3 efforts to "protect the brand" by preventing theming Gnome3, I see this as a case of crying wolf.

Looks like it is not as set in stone as thought, round two of voting?:

https://www.debian.org/vote/2014/vote_003

I have a question about gtk themes and security.

First you gotta understand that I worked for years in government, where we were pounded left and right about social engineering and proper IT security and communicating to the public, etc, so that our magic fairy dust knowledge would be protected. So, I naturally became even more cautious than I am naturally. Second, you gotta understand that I hate the grey gtk theme. Ugh, give me glorious black, charcoal, midnight, just bring down the lights. I used to use tawan's gtk-carbon theme (http://ta-wan.deviantart.com/art/carbon-fiber-gtk-160333821), which is almost perfection to me, back when I only surfed casually and did no personal financial, or any truly private junk on my linux system. Just a toy. But now, with my understanding of linux increasing (partially from using linux both at home AND work), I am more inclined to make the move completely. But that means it has to be more secure, so that I can do banking and stock market speculation etc.

The xbm and png files used to skin windows are jpg files with root permissions, right? So, how am I supposed to feel regarding someone's generic gtk theme I downloaded from boxlook or DeviantArt or whatnot? Image files can contain code other than just the image itself. Shouldn't I be cautious about this?

Much of the malware in image files takes advantage of Windows file naming convention where the file extension type is not shown i.e. anything.jpg.exe will usually be shown by Windows as anything.jpg.
Windows will run .exe files, Linux can sometimes through WINE otherwise they are simply files.

Remember that this is open source which means that the underlying code is always available for you to read.

Themes and styles are often in the root file system, this is not automatically the same as executable.
They can also be placed in the home partition, which does not have root permissions however those themes and styles will only be available for the users of that /home.

Check the file properties/permissions if the execute bit is not enabled no danger.
You are not the first with such concerns, see here:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2016144

Things I'm reading have me increasingly concerned about systemd;
Seems that it is planned to take over package management, and become the underlying process for the terminal.

WhatDaFuq does an init system need to get involved in doing all that for?

The end result will be that ALL Linux distros will become the same.

Aren't these devs employed by the same company that employs the Gnome3 devs who work so diligently to eliminate all deviation from "the brand" and talk of creating the GnomeOS.
Interestingly Gnome3 has systemd as a dependency.

Edit: this was written before I read statmonkey's post about systemd taking over how the file system works:
http://vsido.org/index.php?topic=826.msg9694#msg9694