I believe that changes to more recent versions have made the # of extents relatively a non-issue.

I'm with you .. I remember having a rule that we configure our tables and indexes to have no more than 5 extents over 2 years of use. I was deathly afraid of having a bunch of extents. It only makes sense to lessen the number of hops from extent to extent, right? That's got to have some additional overhead, right?

I've got a better technical explanation in a white paper somewhere around here. I'll dig through my stuff and post the details when I find them.