For its credit though, it follows the C++ "philosophy" fairly faithfully. If you don't like Boost you probably don't like C++ either.

Although that download is a monster, I think its like 1.6 GB even compressed. Its not modular at all, some of the modules depend on others and its impossible to separate them out (they've tried in the past)

But last I check there is ALOT they could have removed, especially support for older compilers like MSVC 200x (!), pre C++ 11/older GNU compilers, etc. without compromising functionality. I'm not if they got around to doing that.