Your requirements list probably excludes all of the binary distros. I've used Arch/Manjaro extensively and can't agree that they are light in any sense except that the original install is a small base. After that their packages have the same extensive, all-inclusive, dependencies as Fedora.
For me it was impossible to accept anything less than Funtoo for my last notebook installation (Toshiba Satellite with amd dual-core, radeon graphics - 4GB ram). I did want to know if everything was going to work so I got the latest Calculate Linux iso, partitioned the drive with a swap, two "root" parttiions and a home partition, installed Calculate KDE, and tested the wireless, trackpad, etc. Calculate could easily be the end of the line; it is built with Gentoo, uses standard emerge and allows you to build packages with your own USE flags if necessary. It is a really nice and very flexible binary distro that allows you to "lighten" it as much as you need. Of course it uses OpenRC. I suspect that it ticks all of your checkboxes.
But to get exactly what I want, which is a system that uses openrc and avoids unnecessary or trouble-prone daemons (e.g. avahi, pulseaudio, dbus, kdepim, notifications) I build my own set of binary packages on my workstation and share those via http so that I can install Funtoo on the other partition, drawing packages from my own binary repo. In order to support different USE flags and CPU_FLAGS_X86 and CFLAGS in the repo than I have on my workstation I do the package building in a chroot, rather like is done with Poudriere for FreeBSD.
Why not explore distcc? You've got other Funtoo systems laying around, it's possible to set up the laptop to not even do any of the compiling, just linking, and if you're really concerned about the SSD and don't care how long it takes, you could set up all of the linking to occur over a NFS mount (not recommended...but possible!).
Years ago I did something like this between a laptop and desktop both running Gentoo. It worked well because the laptop wasn't nearly as powerful. Around the same time I also used distcc in an internship, to farm out compilation tasks from one master server to 40+ slaves (which weren't useful until the software was compiled...), which was awesome because it turned an all day compilation into a 30 minute affair, and none of the engineers understood how I had done it :D.
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