To link or not to link?

I came across a post extolling the virtues of linking your Blogger template to an external stylesheet. By default, the Blogger template contains its own CSS, wrapped up in a couple of style tags. That's what MIB does too. Now, it's easy to save your CSS file separately and link to it from within your Blogger template file, and it's normally good practice to follow this procedure when designing normal HTML files (for some of the reasons listed in the linked article). But on Blogger pages it's a BAD idea. And here's why:
You will have to pay for the bandwidth. Let's say your blog gets 500 visitors a day and your style sheet weighs in at 7K. That's a total of 3.5M bandwidth you provide everyday, or 100MB a month. Blogger is free in every way; it pays for your bandwidth and has plenty of it!
There is little or no gain in performance. Let's take the example of a 7K style sheet again. Of course, the actual text included within the style tags won't amount to 7K; it'll probably be around 5K (a separate file contains meta-data that adds to its size). If your average visitor visits 3 pages on your site s/he uses a total of 15K worth of styling information. If the blogger file linked to an external file s/he would use 7K, representing a saving of 8K. Even on a dial up connection, this would represent a tiny amount. If you are really worried about bandwidth usage, make sure your page doesn't display any non-essential images, and give users the choice of viewing images by providing a linked thumbnail. Remember, by using CSS instead of inline styling, you're already doing your bit!
One Blogger page creates all the others. The main reason I recommend using external style sheets when designing non-Blogger sites is that it makes editing several pages a pain free operation. Simply edit the one CSS file and all HTML files that link to it are affected. This obviously beats editing 20 separate pages! However, Blogger doesn't work like that. The template file contains all the information required for every single page on your blog; editing this one file affects all the others. In fact, linking to an external CSS file is actually more cumbersome in this case, as you have to open it in your text editor, and then upload it to your webspace using an FTP client.
It's easier to distribute one file than two. If you do want to share your template, you will have to share the CSS file as well (or at least provide a link so it can be downloaded). And then what if it proves popular? Say 50 bloggers start to use it, linking to the copy on your webspace. Before you know it, you're paying for GBs of bandwidth a month!