Why is TeX such a mess?

The simplest, modern route to using T_EX is to download TeX Live, but it's such a huge mess. Even the lightest installation can be hundreds of megabytes, and there are so many files it needs its own package management system.

Why can't I just download pdftex and run pdftex foo.tex and get a PDF? Why is there so much cruft for what is supposed to be ``traditional'' UNIX software?

>>19
TeX itself is actually relatively small, around 23K lines of Pascal for the basic .tex -> .dvi functionality. All the rest of the bloat is in crap that only a small subset of TeX users use or even know about
nobody uses Tex, the La part of Latex was developed by Leslie Lamport is the actual markup syntax that everyone uses to make documents