Yea, maybe I will load LXDE ontop of Djohnstons Katana/Razor cutie and see what happens with it. He is way better at making a distribution than I am.
My feeling is simply that his experience started longer ago and his level of training is higher. This does not mean you are not good, this means you need getting experience (which will come with time, obviously).
If you want to continue training, perhaps you would have to try both ends alternatively : once strip a distro, the other time build from the base, or from a very small base. In Debian, one interesting method for a start is using a netinstall to install Debian and once the netinstall installed, boot to the black screen (the tty), and start installing the X server, driver for your gpu, a desktop... that kind of stuff, and have a look at what it pulls in (and what it doesn't pull in).