Is that a valid criticism though? I don't run a desktop, just a window manager (scrotwm), and I can still run KDE apps without having to load the entire KDE desktop environment. (Gnome I don't know about, as Slackware doesn't provide Gnome.)

Also, does 'shell' mean something specific to desktop people? What you detail as being the shell, I would call 'desktop'. But I could very well be out of touch with the current lingo.