Running an application that requires some aspect of Pike that the Pike on your system doesn't have does not fill (pike -x module is broken, there is no GTK or SDL module, for instance)
huh? please check again! GTK and SDL are there.
The example was of the situation where you install a pike and did not pick the sumo variant, so you ended up with a pike minus some parts in other packages (in this case, installing a pike sans SDL/GTK/Mysql).
Debian is relevant to the discussion mostly as an example of what can be done and which problems might arise. The issue above is that the resolver that the Debian smallish pike uses does not help the user to add stripped components. We might want to consider that to make Monger better equipped to handle the issue.