Re: XSLT use cases; data-centric to document-centrict

  I think it's only natural, that processors perform better with well
  written stylesheets than with stylesheets, containing only one very
  big template.

That doesn't sound natural to me at all.
Splitting things up by named templates is like using functions and
subroutines in other languages. It's easier for a human to understand
and maintain but if push comes to shove you might exepect to get some
minimal performance gains by inlining the functions (templates)  back
into your main template so avoiding the function call overheads.

Ok, it's not natural :) But I think authors of xslt processors will focus
primarily on real world stylesheets than on weird ones. So the processors (if
the authors succeed) will more likely to perform good on well written
stylesheets. :)

Are you sure that somewhere in your big template you don't have
<xsl:apply-templates select="."/>
That would cause stack overflow...

Yes, I'm sure. I only select child-nodes.
And the stylesheet works, when there are not 500 but only 200 block-level
elements.