symfony-standard is the base for your projects. suggest does not make sense in projects (either the project uses the dependency or it does not, there is no optional stuff)

Before being a base project it's a package, so imo it's fine to have a suggest section, if I follow your reasonment then the description is wrong, shouldn't it be "A Symfony Project?" :)

In both situations what doesn't make sense is to keep this on final products, not to have it on the base package.

suggests are displayed when installing deps. symfony-standard will never be installed as a dependency, so these suggestions will not be displayed

let's say they'd just be displayed differently (in an IDE instead of a console).

We have removed those bundles because of their license.. does not make sense to me to suggest installing them.

In principle, keeping the license as low as possible makes sense. In reality, the vast majority of projects created based on this distribution will be licensed proprietary and be able to use bundles with other licenses (caveat: I'm no lawyer). I am in favor of suggesting these two bundles and adding (Apache license) to their descriptions. It is more friendly and (dare I suggest) more 🇫🇷

As far as when suggested packages are displayed, it would be nice if Composer's create-project command did this.

I think we need to have a discussion about which bundles to include anyway. Like the REST bundle, or the other important bundles. ping @lsmith77

I'm a big fan of contextual configuration, which annotations provide.

btw .. while FOSRestBundle can work with the core serializer most people use it with JMSSerializerBundle which in turn due to some unfortunately dep pulls in pretty much every single line of code @schmittjoh has ever written:
schmittjoh/JMSSerializerBundle#294

@lsmith77 I agree with the deps, but I guess the amount of lines does not really matter in the end if there must not be a single line of non-MIT code.