I think making CSS more like a programming language is a bad idea. Insofar as LESS lets you do dumb programming tricks in your faux CSS it's a bad idea. I think SASS is going in the wrong direction of putting more ability to create convoluted rubbish in the hands of people who create enough convoluted rubbish with simpler tools.
And I think the signs of activity on LESS vs. SASS reflect not that SASS is in mor aggressive development, although it might be, but tha LESS is more popular but the developers are more cautious in adding features.
Based on what? Sass helps me to write cleaner, better organized code. Furthermore, it reduces typing work. It's great, really. There is a reason why more and more people are using it.
Did you see the vendor prefix debacle? With Sass/Compass, vendor prefixes aren't an issue anymore. Everyone who used Sass/Compass correctly was not part of the problem.
How do you handle sprite sheet generation? How do you handle cache busting of your background images? How do you handle vendor prefixes? These things are very annoying to handle if you have to do that manually.
> I think SASS is going in the wrong direction of putting more ability to create convoluted rubbish in the hands of people who create enough convoluted rubbish with simpler tools.
This sounds like maybe more of a people problem than a technical problem.
And I think the signs of activity on LESS vs. SASS reflect not that SASS is in mor aggressive development, although it might be, but tha LESS is more popular but the developers are more cautious in adding features.