Food for thought: all this wisdom is really an attempt to prioritize how bits hit your browser and is very much due to legacy issues. These are hacks, albeit clever and measurably better. HTTP2 when it comes (2014?) will negate the need to inline/concatenate CSS or cook up image sprites because it solves it at the proper level, the network layer.
If you load large amounts of render blocking JS/CSS in the , the browser must wait for it to finish downloading before it can render content in to the screen.
To deliver a fast experience, keep the amount of JS/CSS needed to render the initial view to a minimum. Ideally, that'd be no JS, and just the CSS needed to style the content in the initial view. Then, once the initial view has rendered, load the JS and additional CSS needed for the rest of the app.