I agree with you hannimal. Enlightenment, kde, xfce, icewm, fluxbox. These things are what hooked me in at first. Then I tried to replace VL soho with my mepis again, and ubuntu, but the speed of the system was too low.
The first thing that really made me say, VL Soho for me was the speed and responsiveness of kde on my 128MB RAM laptop. This looked beautiful and multimedia rendered awesomely than any other distro ever tested on it.
My first impression was, WOW. I have never seen fluxbox look so great , themeable and customizable on any other distro. I was sold.
The main reason, I ventured away from some time was that my VL CD was given to a friend, and my older PC malfunctioned due to heavy age, and CPU getting damaged...
I am still distro hopping until Vector Soho 6 comes out.
Right now, Zenwalk is the new slack-based distro trying to do and push the envelope on what VL has been doing.
The main thing making me use Zenwalk 3.0 over Vector dynamite is mainly, the XFCE implementation after installation. Zenwalk's XFCE looks slightly better to me than the VL dynamite default desktoip background.
I know it is still in dynamite stage. Also, the guys there have started to use gslapt like VL. Here I see VL as the innovator. I look forward to what they launch in VL 6 Soho.