I’m having really big issues with the way that we’re supposed to create custom publishing sites, i.e. internet facing web sites. The OOB publishing site template creates a lot of junk that we don’t want or need. And the approach of creating a custom site definition (minimal) is not very nice either, because even if it’s really small, your'e pretty much 100% stuck with it forever once you created your first site based on it. Are you even allowed to change the Hidden property to TRUE to hide a site definition after you've created a site on it?

Wouldn't it be possible to create a publishing site solutions by using a blank site and then activating a feature that sets up all the stuff we need through activation dependencies or code?

If SharePoint should be considered as a serious option for external web sites, there must be a decent solution to this, right?