yeah, once you move away from any kind of "it comes preinstalled with a DE" type distro, moving to a headless barebones distro is easy, and you can mostly take your configs with you... xorg is also so frickin easy these days. I've yet to try something even more minimal like arch or.. from scratch! but maybe one day with enough time :)
I think The trick to helping others though is to show it can be done in stages, because trying to learn everything at once is too hard, it's easy to forget how long it took to acquire all of the knowledge and skill that make it seem easy to set up a bare bones linux distro into something comfortable and yet lightweight.
For most people I'd advise: Ubuntu (cos the web will help), then find your lightweight desktop of choice by installing and experimenting along side... then try to replicate it on barebones (or ubuntu server, mostly just involves adding xorg to your install list)... then experiment with more lightweight distros... and if tinkering with your desktop is not satisfying enough then you will no doubt go down the from scratch route as well eventually but at that point you don't need people telling you what to do. The thing that's lost with my seemingly simple suggestion is that you will learn so much by yourself while trying to achieve this, but without sacrificing your productivity.