LFS also offers an ideal compiling environment. divers LFS derivates offer self compilation and both books LFS and BLFS all instructions to do that step by step!
the problem of Slackware is the same as from Puppy: no central depository and a terrible searching if you want more than usual package but that will probably not afraid Puppy users !
(see for the perfect SliTaz organisation: www.slitaz.org, doc.slitaz.org, mirror.slitaz.org, forum.slitaz.org etc.! and a automatic warning system in the doc if a language is older that the mother version of the text!)
No more dependency management
Don't we already have PXE for booting from network? If the idea is that you really want to need a partial runtime environment available locally to boot from and then access extras with your method, then where do you draw the line between what is required locally and what is extra (only available with network running and enabled. Another variant which does something similar is httpfs which mounts directories which are online from an already-running system.