[lucb1e]

If you ever want to sell your site, a decade of data is valuable. But the relevant part is when you start growing. If you have a couple of visitors, just maintain the site for fun (like my personal blog and some handy tools that I and a few others use), the data of that period is not going to be very interesting anyway. Once it starts growing and you start thinking "maybe this site has value for many people", then the analytics is more than -- as your parent comment says -- "well, no, but it's nice to have…". I don't think you're disagreeing: it's valuable if you want to sell, but if it's only nice to have and not necessary, you're probably also not having the kind of site worth selling.

So in conclusion, I support not putting analytics on sites that don't need it. And if it turns out you need it, most of it can be reconstructed from access logs (perhaps not the user's screen resolution, but definitely rough visitor counts). We have enough bloated pages already. But of course, if you already expect that you might need the data later, it's a different kind of site.