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"Small core" and distributions are all fine and good, but is anyone actually paying attention to make sure that the end result is a Drupal that someone (especially a single site ower/admin/writer) can use to make a site?

Yes. The impetus behind ideas like "small core" is not to emphasize developer 'fun' over end-user experience. One of Drupal's biggest problems at the moment is that it is used for many, many use cases -- from single user blogging to community organization to ecommerce to newspapers to brochureware. Attempting to put 'what someone needs to make a site' into core will very dramatically from site to site.

BlogAPI, for example, has suffered considerably in core due to few eyes focusing on its needs. It is used by a relatively small percentage of sites. While I'm torn on whether it should have been removed or not (I'm a fan of 'enabling APIs' staying in core even if the installed base is small), it has been broken in many of the most requested use cases for some time.

Migrating it to contrib where it can be explicitly supported by those with more direct interest in the blogging use case will give it a much better chance, and a much shorter cycle time for fixes and improvements. walkah and I, for example, have wanted to work AtomPub support into it for some time, but development of the module has been tied to Drupal core's release cycle and we haven't been able to justify the work while other matters in core loomed for the 7.x release.