Agreed. I turned off Recommends years ago on all my systems, because it
installs too many things I don't want (by both the mild "takes up
space" criteria and in many cases the "don't want an extra daemon
running" criteria).
Here's a Python script (using python-apt, which you'll need installed)
that will find and print all unsatisfied Recommends on your system:
#!/usr/bin/python
import apt
c = apt.Cache()
for pkg in c:
if pkg.installed is not None:
for rd in pkg.candidate.get_dependencies("Recommends"):
if not rd.installed_target_versions:
print pkg, rd