As far as workflows are concerned my opinion is that keeping things *simple* should be the primary goal for any ConTeXt minimal distribution. I think you may have misunderstood the purpose of the minimals. "Minimal" here generally refers to effort - both on Hans' side and on
Oliver Buerschaper wrote: the user's side - rather than any notion of these distributions being stripped down. There has been some discussion on the main list of the stripped down distribution type that I think you're looking for, but it's important to know that the minimals are *not* it. The minimals are designed as an "unzip and go" *complete* package - "everything with minimal effort", not "the minimum you need to get started".
Now this is my one and only motivation for getting rid of the shell script "setuptex" and the need for all those environment variables. There's really nothing more to all my questions about configuration files ...
This is also illuminating. The concept of the setuptex script (as I understand it) is precisely to allow the minimals to operate completely independently of any other installed TeX systems. The point is that you only run the setuptex script in the shell in which you want to run ConTeXt. These environment variables aren't meant to be set globally (again, AFAIK), they are meant to be set for the session. To me this is what makes the minimals highly portable and easy to integrate into cross-platform scripts and applications. Your issues appear to me to be rather specific to your own environment, which perhaps does not allow you to run in this way.
One should agree on the simplest ConTeXt workflow possible and then design the minimals primarily with that idea in mind rather than trying to support each and every workflow under the sun right *out of the box*. The most common scenario will most probably be the average desktop user wanting to typeset a document interactively.
The simplest workflow possible is quite a different proposition, and should not be being addressed by the minimals. And the "average desktop user" is extremely difficult to define for ConTeXt - I suspect they don't use a Mac, for a start. :-) Duncan