I understand your point of view. 
I can explain how I came to my advice
Remember that what I wrote that my advice was only valid if it was a BIOS vs. GPT problem ?
Keep that in mind because the rest that I wrote is based on that. Also that I had to setup two laptops two days ago with comparable age, specs and bootproblems.
Here is my reasoning:
I usually do not send people to distro's that I didn't try out myself.
Especially in this case where the installer must not be GPT oriented.
Distro's tend not to mention this. That means discovering what boots by trial and error.
All official 'buntus are GPT based and won't boot on certain BIOS based computers.
MATE/XFCE:
The "lightweight" MATE and XFCE distro's I tested were already a bit too heavy for a 1 GB computer. Also , due to the ever expanding GTK libraries, i.e. transistion GTK2->GTK3->GTK4 both MATE and XFCE tend to get fatter and slower over time and I don't see the end of it yet.
Even Trisquel (MATE on Debian that I tested some years ago) on an old computer (2004) with plenty of RAM (2GB) was sluggish (which was also partly due to not having a SSD ofcourse)
LXDE/LXQT:
Since LXDE became LXQT it became almost as heavy on RAM as MATE and XFCE. They also no longer claim to aim for "lightweight". I used to have Lubuntu in my netbooks but switched to a Moksha based distro for this very reason, I haven't tested any non-ubuntu based LXDE/LXQT yet.
AntiX:
I would have advised AntiX, which I love and which I tested two days ago on both of the machines mentioned earlier in this thread but it was a disaster.
AntiX booted very slow, would fall back to a commandprompt after boot. The displaymanager had to be started manually. It had a lot of irritating papercuts (like constantly changing the hostname to default). The Sony Vaio (nVidia GeForce 7300 go) wouldn't even do graphical stuff at all because the nouveau driver wouldn't load. This is completely contrary to my normal AntiX experience. I used to go for Antix 19 which was the best. Now we have AntiX 23 which is in my opinion not up to par.
Trinity:
Yes, Trinity (=KDE3) based disto's are pretty lightweight and can work perfect on earlier mentioned laptops
The only one I tried on a BIOS problematic laptop (the above mentioned Toshiba) was Q4OS and it worked like a charm. The workflow however was completely alien:
Q4OS is traditional Linux but the interface a perfect windows XP lookalike (including the traditionally ugly bitmapped fonts), the usability is not very pretty because the interface tends to get in the way instead of helping you.
Nevertheless, Q4OS is fast, light and installed and ran without a hitch and is therefore a suitable candidate.
Moksha:
Fork of E17 (enlightenment) Lightest desktop around, fast, elegant, polished and easy to use.
Unforunately there is only one distro that uses the Moksha desktop.
Fortunately it is a distro based on Ubuntu repositories: Bodhi
So why 32-bit Bodhi ?
- most important: installer uses MBR
- I tested it two days ago on two BIOS-problematic machines
and it ran the most fluent, fast and elegant of the four distro's I tested
- Traditional desktop, easy to customize and the amount of customizability is insane
.
- easy install / easy to use
- Ubuntu based
- eats 130MB RAM on average
- fast on old hardware
I haven't tested Sparky or Spiral on forementioned hardware yet so I could not advice it.
I might test them in due time though 
