+1 to the above comments.
What is driving the idea? Did someone get scared by the size?

I think we all expect people to use our online documentation and get dependencies automatically via build tools; for those who can't, probably because of internet accessibility reasons, it's probably easier to get the full pack in one go.

Not least I see the dist as a full backup snapshot of the project.

The Hibernate Search / OGM dist discussion is more tricky, as it approximately repeats most of ORM but with variations, I guess that's more confusing.