Q:

Remove jQuery and find out what is asking it to be included

I'm using drupal 7 and I simply don't want jQuery included at all. It seems like most people are advocating modify the js in a theme hook. That's fine I suppose, but it seems like this is dangerous and a little silly.
If we're removing jQuery after something has requested it, won't that break whatever requested? How can I find out what is requiring jQuery?
Related to that is all the system CSS files that are included by default. I've also found that using a theme hook to get rid of them is the way to go. It seems like Drupal has a lot of "features" like this that require you to add more code to remove things. It seems like there should be a more efficient way to handle things like this. (forgive me if I'm mistaken, I'm coming from years of work with frameworks and not a full stack CMS).
In the end, what I want is a theme that has NOTHING in it except what I explicitly say should be there. Right now I'm considering just writing the html.tpl.php to not use the dynamic drupal variables.

A:

I think that it is pretty safe to assume that any module using JS is going to assume that jQuery is present.  Yes they should feature detect this, but its availability in Drupal is pretty much assumed by everyone.  There is no real way to get a list of all of the jQuery dependencies.
CSS can be aggregated and minified if the worry is file count.
If you truly want to manage these yourself, your best bet is to remove the $scripts and $styles variables from html.tpl.php and manage your own, eg $myscripts and $mystyles.  You could also unset/reset them in your own template_process_html.
Drupal is built on hooks.  Don't think of it as having to add code to remove something.  You add code (implement hooks) as a way to modify or extend the default behavior.
Now that I have answered your question, you are really going out of your way to bypass a lot of the power of Drupal.  You should start by looking into what Drupal calls starter themes or base themes.  The Omega and Zen themes are two popular ones.

