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As a general answer, most of the things you find unnecessary, maybe are unnecessary. But the ePub format is not something created from scratch just for books, it uses some file formats and conventions that already existed, to make it easier to create reading applications and books from already existing code, to make it easier to parse them (because there are already tools that can deal with those things), etc. And although those pieces may look like garbage to you, they are there to let software know what it's dealing with. The effect they will have in the final filesize will most likely be minimal.
I would advise you to have a look at some of the books I've uploaded here. They're all coded "by hand", and have pretty minimal markup overhead, I believe. Of course, they have some things you think unnecessary, like author, TOC, illustrations or description.
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