The only other sub-vi replacement situation in which you would not need to re-link sub-vi's is if the connector pane has not changed and the only change to the connections on the connector pane is that the only additional controls/indicators have been added to some empty terminals. In this case, you just need to save the change to the caller.
So there is a small possible future time savings advantage of choosing connector panes with extra unconnected terminals when you first write a VI which will likely change and will be called from many callers. But if you change a control type or the connector pattern, or remove an item association from any terminal of the connector pane, relinking will be necessary. If the problem justifies the effort, you could always write one or more sub-vi call wrappers that use VI server methods to set and get the sub-vi's control/indicator values by <i>name</i>. If your sub-vi has certain inputs that only take effect in some types of calls, this could allow you to have different simplified wrapper sub-vi interfaces to the same core sub-vi.
