Best practices - Only download CSS you need, or use a minification process?

Question

In the context of improving overall site performance (downloading and rendering speed) there appears to be a contradiction between the following two best practices:

Answer 1

There is always trade-offs. If you find yourself making many CSS files and there are too many dependencies such that tracking which CSS file to inlcude becomes difficult, it would be better to make one (or at most two) CSS files and minify them. Hopefully your CSS files are not crazy-big.