If you have Titanium Backup I would suggest going in to any and every app you're thinking about getting rid of and 'Freezing' it. This does the same thing as renaming the file, and is fast an painless. Plus it's super easy to undo if you accidentally freeze something that is crucial to the operation of the OS and you weren't aware of it. You just simply go back and 'Defrost' the app.
After a reboot any and all frozen apps will no longer be in your app drawer or anywhere else on your phone unless you're looking through a list of directories or something.
P.S. a few days after doing this if your phone isn't acting strange or different you should be able to safely delete any of your frozen apps that you REALLY just don't want on your phone any longer. I'm not bothered by them still being on there. Out of sight is out of mind for me. I have several apps frozen that I wasn't sure if they were hogging CPU or battery resources, so I froze them to see if my phone reacted positively to the switch.
In the case of my DX/D2 app, this certainly helped me find my problem.