Mark, thanks for feedback!
I'll be honest that I left gcc and gdb in there by accident. As Dan said, we are trying to reduce size of that container so it's easier to use. Who decides what's in it? This was an internal collaboration with multiple people -- in the end, everyone can express themselves and provide feedback or suggestions.
Would you be able to come up with a complete list of packages you have in mind? Creating a new issue in Atomic WG issue tracker would be really helpful to us:
https://pagure.io/atomic-wg/issues
I agree with Dan that this could be a good candidate for a debugging container -- tools container could contain sysadmin tools and the debugging container could be used for debugging applications and maybe even C-development.
Tomas