Hello Helmut,
I would like to suggest that the slime-fancy contrib be loaded by default. Some of those features have become rather fundamental to me and, I suspect, to many other SLIME users as well.
IMHO, it would be unfortunate if newcomers didn't get to experience the CLOS inspector, autodoc, presentations, the REPL(!), etc, because of inadequate default settings. I believe said newcomers will quite likely find SLIME somewhat anemic and underwhelming.
I hope you take this suggestion into consideration and I'd be glad to prepare a patch with the necessary trivial changes to slime.el and slime.texi.
Thanks.