I can take the blame... guilty as charged ;) 

But I'd like to share it with Tim :) who also likes the idea that ELSE is the monolith that mostly backs PlugData, and that you only need to install it (and Cyclone) to offer a full compatibility between PlugData and Pd-Vanilla.

While we're at it, I think ELSE relates a lot to ceammc, which is also a monolithic distribution, but also a fork of Pd. I wouldn't go as far as forking Pd, but in a sense, having Pd-Vanilla with ELSE is a bit like running a fork of Pd, with even GUI plugins. 

And I like this idea of offering a cohesive and complete system, and that it is also the single dependency of my Live Electronics Tutorial. In fact, the Live Electronics Tutorial is the true thing that did motivate it all... ELSE was just something to back it up...

But now that we have PlugData I also see ELSE as the backbone of this fork. 

cheers