[hobnail]

I have both. But I rarely use the formatting classes and have all of that stuff within the css for the "ordinary" tags. For example, occasionally I need a noindent paragraph but for the normal case as in a paragraph after an h2 or h3 tag I have

dl + p,
hr.asterism + p,
header + p,
p:first-child,
section.endnotes ol,
table + p  {
    margin-top: 1.0em;
    text-indent: 0em;
}

The plus means the css is for the tag (p) after that plus and in the html that tag (p) immediately follows what is in front of the plus (header, table, etc.). My h2 and h3 tags are inside a header group/block which is why you don't see them in this css.

For a tag that's inside another thing it's a space instead of a plus:

blockquote p, div.block p {
    margin-top: 0.25em;
    text-indent: 0em;
}

My goal is to use as few class="whatever" tags as possible.