Anyway on to the suggestions:

Provide a base install, even if text based that does fit on a cd with an addon package that can be installed via apt afterwards to bring the system to "current level".  As an alternative provide an image of an already installed system that could be flashed to the hd via dd or some other method.  This would allow hardware with less than 512mb to still work.  For example I have a laptop with 256mb and a 1gb swap space that works well even with firefox and web surfing. It's not always easy to acquire a dvd drive for older hardware (I ended up purchasing one on ebay) and the laptop in question had a USB 1.1 port that flat refused to boot using PLOP boot manager and a boot cd. If I forced usb 1.1 mode in PLOP settings to mode 1 I could get to the boot menu but it would hang once I hit enter on any selection.  Speaking of swap space, for systems with less than 2GB memory please consider increasing the swap space allocated.  Currently you appear to allocate swap on a 1 for 1 basis....1GB ram gets a 1GB swap area...in the early days the rule of thumb was 2X or even 3X memory and this works better for pc's with 1GB or 512mb.  

My understanding is you went from leafpad back to gedit but in doing an apt-cache show leafpad the description seems to indicate leafpad's primary purpose is to use less resources than gedit so I didn't see why it was left out.   For users who like a drop down console similar to yakuake/guake the program stjerm with the appropriate settings in .Xdefaults provides a very light clone.  Screenshot available here:  http://postimg.org/image/qpa8g0kzl/

.Xdefaults used:  [ copy/paste the following lines into a file named ".Xdefaults" in your home dir ]

A suggestion related to the conky you use which is very nice but defaults to showing eth0 activity.  On a laptop the user will regularly go from wlan0 to eth0 or even wlan1 and eth1...if a symbolic link to the actual device was used and that symbolic link was updated when a network was brought up, possibly using the if-up.d and if-down.d directories and a script to monitor network changes (at least that's what they are on opensuse..ubuntu is new to me) then network activity would always be the current device....this would also work for the lxde network monitor if you change the device monitored from eth0 to for example "net0" or some such symbolic link.  The final suggestion would be that the "Onyx" windows borders would seem to be a better fit for the XP paradigm than the current ones used.

Thanks for working hard to make a very nice os to use....it's the first other distro I really liked enough to consider using long term other than opensuse which I've used for several years.