You can avoid much of the font embedding and use much cheaper alpha masks. I used Texture Packer for this and tried to demonstrate how to do so here:
There is also an interesting tutorial by @drewbullen about using SVG symbols and Export To Hype (Illustrator Edition) allows exporting to Base64 in external CSS. So, many options.
If you only need the packing it can be beneficial, but it really depends on your case. There is much to optimize, but the web is also getting faster and the clients more powerful.