There is no direct alternative for aptitude why AFAIK. But Aptitude itself is very useful.
It allows to repair system with serious breakage.
Looks very similar to previous post -
And I need to say that such experiments are safer on Virtual Machine with snapshots.
Here for clean minimal installation you may want to use tasksel install ubuntu-mate-core or apt-get install ubuntu-mate-core^
On installed system you can check the dependencies list on packages.ubuntu.com and adjust list of packages on installed system to it.
If you want to save disk space - then enable Size column in Synaptic's Preferences:
and sort list of installed packages on size to get top big packages:
But be careful with removing or purging - you can harm the system.