I'm hoping that's a good thing :/ Chris & I replaced the base CI image, by the way. So at least your starting point nowadays will have clean packages (even if it's not semi-pre-slimmed). I'll take another run at the the minimal-base-image-rehydrated-on-CI approach in the 4.6 cycle.
Ah, good idea. For 4.5, let's let the final deployment image to be one which has never undergone a shrink / rehydration. If we want to risk that for 4.6 release then put out our *second* 4.6 alpha image be one of those rehydrated so it can endure a full release-cycle of testing including under our personal projects.