Full disclosure: my first thought at seeing this thread title was, "Are you kidding?".
If X/Xfce are not running they will waste nothing but disk space; +/- resources used to keep them up to date. You can tell better than anyone on the forum, whether or not that waste is an issue for you.
If an attacker is able to gain sufficient access that they can start the X server and gain an Xfce session, you've already lost part of the battle. Similar arguments hold for having development tools installed (gcc, autotools, perl, python, ruby, ...)
You sound like you don't need Xfce to manage your system, so I'm not sure what your interest is in it, based on what you've written anyway. You can always remove Xfce later if needed; such as using it as a temporary workstation during testing and later moving it out as a dedicated server.
I would not recommend running Xfce while the machine is deployed and under a serious load.
To the rest (e.g. apps), all I can say without quoting Frodo Baggins, is specifics matter.
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Thou shalt check the array bounds of all strings (indeed, all arrays), for surely where thou typest ``foo'' someone someday shall type ``supercalifragilisticexpialidocious''.
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