Writing now from refracta8_xfce_amd64_beta-20160223_0250.iso booted findiso on hd, from my grub menu.
It's looking rather good. A few early observations:
Htop reports 181MB usage with only a terminal open, don't know why yet.
Release notes mention "config=whatever" for cmdline (should be components=whatever)
Refracta logo is too far down (if you want classic bottom panel)
There seems a lot of gtk3 stuff, maybe that's unavoidable now (abiword, audacious, gnumeric, evince, meld, lightdm...) On my hit list would be gnome-mplayer (mpv is smaller and quite good), synaptic, gdebi and transmission. However, you did well keeping it <700MB.
Why is the mate stuff needed?
More later.