You say that the dependencies are too large for your taste. For me that is a sign of a robust design.

Playing Devil's Advocate: there are times when you can go way overboard with dependencies. For instance, Crypt::OpenPGP depends on a huge number of modules, including Math::Pari. Math::Pari is based on the pari C library, which is extremely touchy to compile. When setting up a new system, I often have to restart the pari compile a couple times (usually, the pari binary packages for my system aren't up to date enough). Once installed, Crypt::OpenPGP works quite well, but the Math::Pari dependency is always a pain.