>i copied that out of your style sheet for #29452...

Not “my” style sheet since the style of the download doesn’t match the style that I uploaded to PG.  BUT, in this regard I agree with PG – choice of style should be primarily up to the publishing house (meaning PG), NOT the book transcriber. But for PG to be putting margins within HTML is a mistake IMHO, it is well-established that HTML users set the size of the width of their text by adjusting the width of the surrounding window of the HTML browser.

>   Choice of asterisks as a fancy rule looks a bit strange.

tell me what you want instead.

Leave it out and use some extra vertical whitespace instead, or if you insist on horizontal rules use mdashes --- since EPUB doesn’t have proper support for horizontal rules (but MOBI does), or upsize your asterisks to give them more visual weight and put spaces between them.

>   Too small and too light for the intended use.

i have no idea what this means.

It means that when I read this on my Kindle or in my web browser it is so small and leaves so little visual impact compared to the surrounding text that it looks like a mistake.