It depends in what you are meaning for " a very basic system on top of which all other distros are based."
Why the same basic system has to be the same for a student, for a group, for a school or a goverment server?
This is more marketing . It reminds me the time, after a gazillion bugs/error or hardware misconfiguration you used ti fullfil a w95 setup. Whoa!!!! and then what?
You have the very basic system...doing nothing.
Cmon men, just fire up a network installation disc, grab the packages you need and its done.
Why do you need a ring to make things????