Comment # 11 on bug 797304 from Ludwig Nussel

Unfortunately disabling recommends also disables hardware supplements AFAIK
which might be an undesirable side effect on physical hardware. So hardware
supplements may handling may need to be decoupled from no-recommends in the
solver first.
Then this would eliminate the need for the minimal-conflicts pattern, yes.

An alternative I though of might be to somehow allow a pattern to provide a
list of soft-locks. So I can selectively soft-lock certain packages.