GNOME menus that only contained relevant programs. No lftp, no bc nor dc, perhaps not even the standard X stuff like xterm, xeyes nor xcalc.
An installer that doesn’t suck. All distro’s installers suck these days, PLD’s not the most, but still. I want something that lets me partition with fdisk, and then install some pre-set package lists. Being able to customize the installer disk with set listings would be nice.
Metapackages for major stuff: a gnome metapackage that contains only but all of the main GNOME release. A KDE metapackage that installs the main KDE release, and a tetex metapackage that installs the whole tetex release. Sometimes I do want to test software as the authors intended it, after all.
Theme metapackages.
A different init system, preferably as an option. I’d love to see simpleinit coexist with SysV style. Some noop functions in combined scripts would rock.