maybe a dual floppy approach could help getting a few more items into the distro? or what about RAD disks that the Amiga had (has) .. a RAD disk is basically a RAM disk that stays resident while the machine is powered on, so you could reboot the machine and everything would remain and could even boot from it. dont know if thats even possible on PC hardware though.
probably a good practical solution would be multiple floppy installation that creates a 10MB partition on each hard drive in the box and installs everything into the first 10MB partition on the drive list, then mirrors itself to each drive with a mechanism so that if the master drive on the primary channel develops a fault in this tiny boot partition then it can switch to reading from the boot partition on the primary slave drive etc. this would also save the long term concern of dust/heat/oxides destroying the boot floppy disk and/or the floppy drive itself. plus there would be no need to sacrifice a HDD just to have a boot CDROM present. it would also then allow for adding features for RAID/SCSI/drive repair/whatever into the small boot partition.
for now though i think its great, only just found out about it a few nights ago, dug out an old P200/16 and its up and running happily with some ancient drives...now to save up for some REAL storage