open source business practices

During drupalcon several of the business tracks returned to the same notion of maintaining a list of qualified contriuted modules.
So dear "I drupal for dollars" crowd...
The classics are obviously
1. cck
2. views
3. image field
4. imagecache
And then as requirements start to rise
5. og
6. workflow
7. relativity
8. voting-api (plus most frontends work fine)

So that was easy... but now what about the exotics? What do YOU always include in your projects and what should enter this "absolutly essential module list?"
best regards
Lior

This is the first part of a set of discussions which tries to document the best practices in the management of a successful drupal project from the qualification phase untill the successful signoff and delivery.
The overview thread can be found here - http://groups.drupal.org/node/9483

With the big demand all over the world for skilled drupal talent to deliver drupal based sites the question rises... How and when to say no to projects?
We all know of the client that want's a crazy array of features for a very small amount of money.