Yes, HOB does allow you to edit the whole list of packages since it parses all the metadata from the image recipes and displays it in a graphical form. There are some limitations, though. The following document may help: https://community.freescale.com/docs/DOC-102505
The good thing about HOB is that it does show the package dependencies and there is no other easy way to do this that I know of. However, you may enable buildhistory to look at these dependencies (add lines below to local.conf) this is important because the build may fail if you exclude packages that are required by other installed packages.
INHERIT += "buildhistory"
BUILDHISTORY_COMMIT = "1"
You may exclude packages with the PACKAGE_EXCLUDE command. You may find section 5.13.1. Excluding Packages from an Image of the Yocto Development Manual useful, just keep in mind the dependencies of the packages when excluding them:
http://www.yoctoproject.org/docs/current/dev-manual/dev-manual.html#excluding-packages-from-an-image
