Advantage to building up a starter in steps?

I've read that you can step up your starter by increasing sizes but is there any advantage to doubling up a starter from, say, 1 quart to a half gallon to a gallon as opposed to just pitching the yeast right into the gallon jug?

 

Fourteen Essential Questions About Yeast Starters

 

Making a 1 gal starter in a 1 gal jug..I am still scraping junk off of my stir plate. Two 2qt steps makes a lot less mess...

 

What about a smack pack? could'nt you just pitch that to a 2 liter starter?

 

A smack pack can go straight into any size starter you wish up to about 3 gallons because there is plenty of viable yeast.

What you want to do is step no more than 5-10x the number of yeast cells. So when I start from a slant, I will innoculate about 1 cup of sterile wort on the plate which will build up about 25B cells, and then from there I'll go to 1.5L which will give me about 200B cells. If I were to go from a slant to a gallon starter (I'd need one of those 5000mL mega flasks for that, which I don't have) I would do 1 cup, 1.5L and then 4-5L to stay within the 10X growth maximum.