I am interested in MCE from a home automation aspect. Is there a subset of MCE that does just that? Can the media (music/video etc) aspect be removed? Am trying to end up with a capable yet lean system that will run on modest hardware.
you can, but not out of the box. You'll need to spend some time getting familiar with the source code, to see which modules you want/don't want etc..and build a system to do just that.
-Thom