It just seems to me if you want to do anything with Master Pages in SharePoint–you need Publishing. Even though you can add publishing infrastructure to a Team Site–It seems to be a little of a kluge. Â Things don’t work optimally.
Consider a simple scenario of changing the home page once you’ve added publishing infrastructure to a Team Site. Â You need to recreate the home page in the Pages Library. You can’t copy your old home page because isn’t constructed as a publishing page.
Thoughts. Please even blatantly disagree.  I’m basing my thoughts on my expirments with 2013 which don’t cover all scenarios that you might find useful for your purposes.
I always use / recommend publishing. I find it easier to control the way it looks and how the sub sites inherit the branding.
The only reason I wouldn’t use publishing is if they don’t have it (Foundations or low level o365)
