Some further thoughts from your points:
Smaller sites would presumably have less people working on them and therefore the issue of confusion is possibly less relevant, though the problem of verbosity may be. On the other hand presumably in most cases you'd be starting from a "base" stylesheet anyway so verbosity with regards to maintenance may not be an issue either. That really leaves potentially heavy stylesheets and hence file sizes.
On larger sites I wonder if the verbosity issue balances out ...e.g. you don't specifically need to set margins:0; padding: 0; on numerous elements just as you do need to set them otherwise on other elements. However, the introduction of new, and therefore "zero'd" elements (e.g. an <address> in an article added by a CMS) is a good point.
So to narrow down my original question:
How do those who use it find the balance between file size/verbosity and the debugging benefits/time saving?
Thanks,
Nick
1. Once you have removed all margin and padding, this method relies on you
specifically styling the margins and padding of each HTML element that you
intend to use. On smaller sites where you may only need to style specific
containers and elements this method is very verbose and wasteful.
2. If you were to pass your site on to others who were less aware of CSS,
this method could cause great confusion. The method relies on an
understanding that any used HTML elements will have to be specifically
styled.
You may have styled all elements you needed at the time, but what if a new
element was added by someone else at a later date? They may have no idea why
the element does not operate like it should.
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