Stack Exchange network consists of 183 Q&A communities including Stack Overflow, the largest, most trusted online community for developers to learn, share their knowledge, and build their careers.
This causes the animation to fire off N number of times (number of items in the minicart) which can cause page stuttering if someone has 3+ items in the cart. (And it gets worse with more items 7+ in the cart).
I guess the questions is "Is this the best solution or does anyone have any other better solution?" Sounds like you agree with my setup that it is correct. Which makes me feel good that I have not missed anything.
What's your volume? Are you doing less than 20 orders a day? You probably wouldn't notice the issues with a low volume. onestepcheckout dot com has a good product, but we actually went back to the accordion checkout because as client got bigger and added more touch points, every module supports standard checkout, whereas these add ons all required custom development and introduced custom issues.