A reinstall will get you back to a working desktop for watching media and browsing the internet within half an hour.
Much faster than trying to backtrack all the stuff you did and figuring out what's wrong.
And you seem to have messed up quite a bit by trying to remove a lot of stuff manually, package by package. IMO that's a waste of time, and has a 50/50 chance of messing up apt.
All they take up is a bit of drive space (likely less than 1GB). Just remove what you don't need from autostart and the menus if it bothers you.
Xfce is just so nice and simple.