I fear that this discussion might have veered too far into theoretical territory for some of the conversants, and probably not the _same_ theoretical territory for everyone. With that in mind, I *think* that what Lynn Winebarger is asking for might be best answered by:
Try digging into the package-quickstart part of package, especially p-q-refresh and p-q-maybe-refresh.
On the other hand, I think that the best answer to "should emacs-devel actually care about loading scads of packages" might be:
There seem to be a lot of (potential) emacs users, especially in the "interested but not already heavily enfranchised subset", that make use of emacs "distributions", and that model would probably benefit from improvements to "loading scads of packages".
This doesn't answer the "should" question, but I think it provides a closer-to-real-practice basis for consideration.
Hope that helps,
~Chad