Sanity is, of course, in the eye of the beholder.
Here are a few ideas:
- no systemd
- no PAM (this may change soon)
- no SELinux
- no distro-specific patches
- simple system III 'rc' style init
- simple package management
- modular (no weird dependencies)
- KISS principle
- shell scripts used everywhere instead of binaries
- standard UNIX tools throughout (/sbin/ifconfig instead of 'ip' for example)
- no binary log files
- still provides a nice and complete environment