Hi Steve, a smaller number is definitely more efficient in file size, but unless you're getting up to like 10,000 of these offsets you probably don't have to worry about it.

Many of the later on operations that are going to be performed on your objects (like meshing or toolpath generation) will generally follow the shape of your object and not automatically become more complicated just because there are more control points in the curves. Instead they will be more complicated in areas of high curvature, not just automatically where there are a higher number of points.

It is particularly not convenient to have a whole bunch of points if you want to edit the shape of the offset curve by tweaking control points around, similar to how you would have edited the very original curve. But for the thing that you're talking about, you probably won't be doing that. Typically for the kind of thing that I think you're doing you would focus your effort on editing the original curve to make it shaped right and not want to edit the resulting offset curve, it is just a thing that is calculated from your edited one.

I'd think that you could probably just not worry about that particular thing for your case...

- Michael