Yes, there is Network Install CD. http://fedoraproject.org/en/get-fedora-all Approximately 200MB for i386.

Unfortunately redhat based distros don't support keeping the install minimal past installing the first few things afterwards. There is no --no-instal-recommends --no-install-suggests for RPM based distros and no (easy) way to acheive that either.

It's for this reason that I have, over the past year, discovered that my favorite server OS is debian minimal (with those above flags entered into apt.conf) while my favorite desktop is without a doubt Fedora / gnome3.

This is exactly the opposite of the norm I think, but, fedora pushes the desktop boundaries far further than ubuntu and debian is so highly optimised for minimal server setups.

openSUSE is a RPM distro and it's package manager (zypper) has a --no-recommends when installing packages.

But everyone forgets about use opensuse guys :)

I gave up using "desktop" distro (fedora and ubuntu) for keeping a minimal desktop installation. Too many packages installed by default, too many unrequired dependencies pulled installing new packages, too many problems updating to the newest release. Now I'm using Arch and pondering about gentoo/funtoo or other source based distro.

Install from CD, almost nothing unnecessary there. Also, you can just unselect everything during the install.