If some particular functionality becomes used in a large body of Erlang
projects, it should certainly be brought into the stdlib. Per your Python
reference, one need only look at the "json" module for an example where
bringing something into the stdlib has made deployment and maintenance of
Python code-bases simpler -- no more installing the "simplejson" package,
docs right there on docs.python.org, and JSON earning first-class status
as a serialization format for Python objects.

To advocate actually removing things from the Erlang stdlib, potentially
breaking working code on a large scale, is madness to me.

Thomas Allen