Because everything is linked to a single binary (and due to being strictly
size optimized), it could give quite a bit of disk usage savings on MiNT
lacking shared libs.
Disk usage maybe but the loading time will be horrible. Now every tool would need to load ~1 MB instead of ~100 KB... Another thing is some of the most essential tools (like mentioned login, getty, init, networking tools like ifconfig) are hacked specially for mint -- there's some common basis but it's different code after all. Question is if it's still needed (i.e. if it's possible to take newest linux init/login/whatever and adapt it without too much effort or not).