Since LibreOffice is relatively large, I can see a reasonable argument for leaving it out if it lets us put more shiny things into the LiveCD.
Yes, but that argument was never made. No one ever proposed to put something very shiny on the disk instead of an office suite. Quite the opposite, I haven't seen much of any feedback until today. And when I should choose:
1) an install media with 215 MB empty space and no office suite 2) an install media with 90 MB empty space and an office suite
I definitely choose the latter. It provides a better user experience and a more complete Linux Desktop environment by default.
I secretly wish there were more people on this list who care about the default experience Fedora provides to their users, and I wish discussions raged here whether large LibreOffice is better or worse than smaller Abiword + some more shiny stuff, but as you can see, the discussions don't really happen. So that's why I took initiative and decided to fix at least something.
If you have other proposals how the default desktop should look like and what should/shouldn't be included, please post it. But please be clear about which Fedora release you want to target. Because F18 release data is very near and I _hope_ we will manage to implement at least my proposal. I don't think some large changes can be discussed and implemented in time.