Simplified installation of Trisquel

Hello,

I have been GNU/Linux user for over 10 years now. I have been using
several distros, as you might imagine, and in the last year or so I've
been using libre distros only.

I have been tinkering with rolling release distros, which
is fun, but as I become older I now want for my main machine a distro
that "just works".

I have never been using Ubuntu-based distros intensely, because there
are out-of-the-box too many GUI-based Wizards and configuration tools
for my taste. They are fine for new GNU/Linux users, but for a console
and text file configuration guy like me this makes the system very
complex.

In the moment I use Debian, which I consider "almost libre" since 6.0,
but the software in it is quite outdated. I switched to
unstable/sid which works in general, but sid is de facto a rolling
release distro with which I had to tinker again, (e. g. because the last
dist-upgrade broke something)

So I want to give Trisquel a try. The 6-month-release cycle seems ideal
to me, the software is stable but not too old. The only thing is the
mentioned "bells and whistles". Currently I am running Trisquel in a
virtual machine to test it.

My question is: Is there a method to install a simplified version of
Trisquel, which is more "Debian-like"?

E. g. I don't want a network manager, I want to
edit /etc/network/interfaces for network configuration - but when I
tried to remove NetworkManager with synaptic it installed wicd instead,
another network managing software. It drives me crazy when the package
management software thinks that it's smarter than me :-) While we are
at it: is it possible to revert to Sysvinit again? Took me
years to understand /etc/inittab, and now it is gone :-)

Or maybe there is a list of non-essential packages which I can use to
remove unnecessary packages after installation.

Regards,
Henry