thats certainly an interesting way of thinking to solve your problem.

whatever or however you proceed - do one thing first: run backup app and backup

then no matter what other people may tell you and whatever you might try you can just reflash and restore and get back where you were.

if you do end up reflashing, you can get the effect you want by restoring all and just prior to the stage of re-installing the applications, disable the extras-devel repositories and then continue installing - it will reinstall all apps it can find at that time - so no extras-devel, no devel apps

i'm not certain how to identify currently installed applications from the command line tho, but it should be possible to find out.