VyOS includes a bunch of utilities that aren't used by any scripts, but rather provided for users' convenience. For example, sipcalc is immensely useful for anyone doing subnetting, but it makes no sense to add an op mode command for it.

To make it clear which packages are required for VyOS to work and which ones are just user utilities, we need to keep them separate. We used to have a package list for that, but package lists is a rather clunky mechanism.

A meta-package sounds like a better idea.