The large stylesheets have nothing to do with the SEO bits. They have to do with having a site with a wide variety of different-looking pages and wanting to ha

The large stylesheets have nothing to do with the SEO bits. They have to do with having a site with a wide variety of different-looking pages and wanting to have a single site-wide stylesheet, instead of having dozens or hundreds of smaller stylesheets. Whether that's a useful thing to do or not obviously depends on how your maintenance for the site is set up, how your CDN works, and probably other things I have no idea about; design of this sort of site is not my area of expertise. And while I agree that all of these sites have a lot of complicated styles and scripts going on, I have a hard time believing that a site of the sort I just described can be created without ending up with a fairly complicated stylesheet. If your position is that having such a site (variety of different kinds of pages) should be a non-goal, I can't agree with that: there are plenty of reasons to want a site like that. If the argument is that having a single stylesheet to rule them all in that situation is bad for maintainability, I don't have a good response: as I said I've never maintained such a site, so I don't have a good feel for what the maintenance tradeoffs are. Fully agreed on the taxes. ;)