Well, not so fast. I think your original suggestions are entirely in keeping with Tufte's conclusions. If you let Powerpoint do the formatting, it can lead to a terrible presentation, but as Tufte said, it's "a competent slide manager and projector."

I think that slides with say 40 words or so are perfectly reasonable for presentations. At least in my business, a presentation is an oral and interactive supplement to a written document which may be anywhere from 15 pages (conference paper) to several hundred papers (PhD dissertation). The presenter uses the slides as visual aides and expands on those 40 words.

Just my $0.02.

Chris