That's a pretty elaborate setup.

I have my own toolbox of scripts and plugins, but they're all written in CSS, HTML, and JS. I have CSS files like http://staticresource.com/basic.css upon which I can layer other colour styles like: http://staticresource.com/template/css/themes/swiss.css

I also have plugins that I've written like http://staticresource.com/notifications.html

But this year I decided to do something crazy and put them all together in a really simple site layout: http://staticresource.com/template (source https://github.com/tomhodgins/template-factory)

In the Template Factory you can test all of the themes and the plugins, and add theme support so they work together.

For me to define a new 'brand' on top of this would just mean to author one more CSS stylesheet on top of basic.css and the various plugins used.

Still, if I've gotten this far without Less or Sass - where should I add them where it would benefit me?

I find I do end up hacking on iPad a lot, I can just write HTML, CSS, and JS and create things, then move it to a computer for further work. Here's a super simple HTML utility I made last week to help me build mailto URLS: http://staticresource.com/mailto.html It uses basic.css and the notifcations plugin, but check out the source. You could write a little HTML page like that anywhere, on any device.

For me to introduce some kind of a build process with all these different moving parts would severely restrict the situations when and where I can get work done! I'm a freelancer, I don't get paid by the hour, I get paid for the amount of value I can provide, so it's always in my be$t intere$t to break down any barrier that stops me from being able to work.

I'm able to do a surprising amount of work from mobile, despite mobile browsers lacking a lot of development features desktop browser make available. I have a little app that lets me test responsively on mobile: http://staticresource.com/speedtest.html and another that lets me view the source of any site on: http://staticresource.com/inspect/?

So for me to abandon this freedom and flexibility to only be able to work from one machine, with all these processes running and up to date sounds like a massive step back in productivity for me.

It does sound like you have a beautifully amazing system set up, but it feels full of potential points of failure that don't need to exist. If you need to update one line of text on a website, you should be able to open up a text file on any device, edit one line, and save. Having to do anything else to get something updated seems like intentionally going out of your way to create work for yourself, no?

Also, doing a lot of responsive stuff I've been turned off the idea of using pre-defined breakpoints for responsive design. Your @media (or other) queries need to respond to the elements in your layout and when you feel they need to adapt, which means those breakpoints are defined more by the design than the device. I use a solution that lets me scope responsive styles to the elements themselves, which is an even better solution for high precision responsiveness! Check out http://elementqueries.com It doesn't work so well with SASS, but here's an example of something I built with it recently: http://staticresource.com/reports.html

This design isn't responsive, it's designed to be printed 8.5x11 actually, but you'll notice in my code I have defined color variables in JavaScript and used them both in the JavaScript I send off to Google Charts, as well as in my styles. You wouldn't be able to do that with SASS/Less variables, but this is a real-world use case where I thought using variables might be better than not using them :)