No, that is how it should work (in theory).
You should be able to make your templates using a set of styles (A) and then by applying the stylesheet at the generation, change all the styles to another set (B)
But, in most cases you only need one stylesheet. If that is the case, I would not make life harder then it needs to be.
Just apply your stylesheet to all of your templates. Added benefit is that you get more of a WYSIWYG experience when editing templates.
In your scenario I see a few things that might have gone wrong
- The style is not correctly defined in your stylesheet (easy mistake to make)
- The actual text in your template is no longer a vanilly style, but has overridden it.
- Something else went wrong when trying to apply the stylesheet. I've seen a few bugs in that area from time to time. One I remember was with the "normal" style. For some reason I couldn't get the normal style to change according to the stylesheet. So I've made my own normal style (normal2) and used that everywhere in stead of normal.
Geert