CSS Strategy

My shop has been placing a heavy emphasis on using CSS for the past two

years. I'm obstensibly the fellow tasked with creating and maintaining
the styles, although two other people, my boss and one of the senior
programmers, have a tremendous amount of say in how it's handled.


My question has to do with strategizing css. My boss wants everything
run from a linked stylesheet, with embedded and inline styles strictly
prohibted. His philosophy is that he wants the ability to change a
site's look and feel in an instance by simply replacing the stylesheet.

He's even fanatical enough to bust developers for setting widths in
table cells using traditional HTML.


While I can appreciate the beauty of being able to manipulate hundreds
of pages from one file, I do think that trying to style every minute
aspect of a page is cumbersome and counter productive. Developers are
stifled when they have to come to me at each turn so that I can create
a style "for a cell 182 pixels high, with a width of 342 pixels, an
orange border 2 pixels wide, but with a the top border made green, and
can you make the background go from blue to pink when I mouseover it?"


The result is my having littered my css file with overly specified
styles, some which may only be used once, because we're not allowed to
use embedded or inline styles.


Am I missing something, or are we going about this all wrong?