The reason for the small /boot is since the introduction of dracut you can now use a shockingly small ‎kernel because the initrd is now customized to your box and less modules need to be compiled in too. That said that is a bit small but you can override it it just takes a lot of clicks.

As for gnome it's always been Red Hats favorite because they have had a heavy hand in developing it. It's never been easy ‎to override. That said I've done it with XFCE on rhel 7 and fedora so it's not impossible.
Further more if you are doing a lot of deploys you should be using kickstarts which give you far more control over the installation and guarantee consistency.

What it comes down to is 7 is a new beast with a big learning curve. You need to play with it and not worry about messing it up the first few time because it will happen.

  Original Message  
From: Konstantin Olchanski
Sent: Friday, July 3, 2015 22:10
To: Larry Linder
Cc: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: SL 7.2

On Fri, Jul 03, 2015 at 10:43:52AM -0400, Larry Linder wrote:
> Dear Sir:
> 
> 6. We (everyone in the shop) unanimously hates the GENOME desk top. There 
> does not appear to be able to select an alternate.
> 

Pretty cool! All my bases are belong to you! What did you use to generate this gibberish?

-- 
Konstantin Olchanski
Data Acquisition Systems: The Bytes Must Flow!
Email: olchansk-at-triumf-dot-ca
Snail mail: 4004 Wesbrook Mall, TRIUMF, Vancouver, B.C., V6T 2A3, Canada