GNOME memory

I must say, I'm deeply disappointed in all this GNOME memory usage optimization that's been going on lately. My working desktop (GNOME, Evolution, Firefox, Xchat, gpass, gnome-terminal, gaim and audacious) now takes up a mere 250MB of RAM. What the heck did I buy that gigabyte for?! Darn it, people, code more bloat so I can justify my spending. :)