I actually prefer SASS to LESS. Not just for the syntax but for the feature set as well.

I wasn’t aware sass –watch worked independent of compass. But, having checked it out, I agree it definitely accomplishes the same thing but with several benefits – especially the reduced performance cost.

For what it’s worth, however, the LESS documentation claims that the performance hit is very negligible. Still, why get JavaScript involved at run time if you can avoid it?

Keep up the good work. I’d love to see more people using SASS outside the ruby community.

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And for those of you might have no idea what were talking about:
http://nex-3.com/posts/90-auto-compile-sass-files-with-sass-3

I would strongly caution against using a client-side stylesheet compiler in production, though. It completely breaks styling for people not using JS, which may or may not be a problem depending on the site. But it’s a large problem for any site that cares about its load speed, as the client-side compilation can take time on the order of an additional HTTP request.

Also, as the lead Sass developer, I contest your claim that it requires a powerful backend framework. With the sass command-line tool, it’s easy to integrate Sass with a static site (even during development using sass –watch).