Your plant looks excellent and you've been doing everything right to this point to get it like it is, and I don't see any reason to think your plants' performance won't continue. By bud sites, I mean flowers and you won't see those until the plant starts flowering.
There are a combination of factors which contribute to bud formation and there is a maximum amount of budding that a plant will go through. You of course want to get as close to the maximum bud production as you can. Nutrient uptake is one factor,.. it has to be in the soil and so you've got that covered with what you're doing. The factors affecting the efficiency of nutrient uptake, is soil moisture, pH root surface area and the girth of the stalk. I think you're probably set in these areas. Then there's processing nutrients into plant material, which occurs through using respiration (CO2) and light. There's already enough CO2 to get close to the maximum in the air, but it of course could be supplemented to get you closer.
That leaves lighting, and you'd want around 10,000 lumens or more per square foot, and you'd want the intensity to be the same at the top as at the bottom and the spectrum to be as similar to sunlight as possible. The only way this is close to possible is by surrounding your plant with CFL's. Most all man-made lights have a part of the spectrum, and some have most of the spectrum but are more intense in only part of it, hence the need to switch lights when going from veg growth to flowering. Man made lights also diminish in intensity the further you get from the bulb. Think of a sphere around the bulb, the smaller it is, the more intense the light hitting it. The larger the sphere the more spread out the light is, or less intense. With sunlight that amount diminishes so little over the height of a plant that, you could say it doesn't. That means buds at the bottom, if not covered, will get the same lighting as buds on top. With CFL's the light that sphere sees diminishes very rapidly as you go larger (further from the bulb). Your plant is short right now, but it will get larger and you'll need some side lighting, unless you go through efforts to keep it short.
Not to ramble, but this brings me to my point. When your plants start flowering, you'll see buds develop at each node where each fan leaf joins the stems. In order for each of these buds to grow to their maximum potential they need to be provided with all of the light they can use. That's pretty tough to do with an indoor grow. Even HID's will light the tops a lot better than the sides and virtully no light gets to the bottom or interior. The buds that don't get light will stay fairly small, and production will move to the buds where light intensity is higher.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that the only time I would not remove the tiny flowers as they form on the interior and bottom of the plant where it won't get light, is if I was growing with the maximum light my plant could use, with stalk/roots that are big enough to provide more nutrients than it could convert, and the perfect combination of CO2, temps, moisture and ferts.
If one of these isn't at the max, then you might as well snip some of the buds that won't grow large, and let the production occur where the buds are getting the most light.
Let's take a completely theoretical example,.. let's say your plant develops 30 bud sites (flowers)
Let's also say for example you provide enough stuff, for the plant to produce 10 ozs of bud, BUT under optimal conditions you'd see 12 ounces of bud.
Now let's say you did provide the optimal conditions,.. you could still snip some of the weaker sites, and the larger sites would make up the difference,.. but you may get 11.7 ounces, but instead of 25 popcorn buds, and 5 big ones, you'd get 8 popcorn buds, and 8 big ones. Still almost the same weight but less trimming.
In your situation, where you'll get 10 oz's because your'e not growing outdoors at the equator,.. you'd get 26 popcorn buds and 4 big ones for 10 oz's,.. or you could trim a bit, and get 8 popcorn buds and 6 real big ones and the plant, will still give you 10 oz's.
These numbers are no where near realistic, but you get my point. The more you grow, the less effort you'll want to have to put in during harvesting, and the best way is to combine smaller buds into large ones.
If you do some researching, you may see where some folks only grow one main stalk with one bud at the top in small pots and have lots of plants under their light. They'll get the same yield (if done right) as the folks who grow a few plants with multiple tops like yours. The difference is the harvest and the number of buds each grower is dealing with.
Honestly, for you with only one plant. You may not care about trimming little buds, and to maximize your yield which may only be grams or less in difference, you may want to let it go as is. If you had two plants, I'd suggest trimming one, and letting the other go. Then you could see for yourself the difference between properly coaxing the plant into putting all the yield into the largest buds, and just letting the plant decide where it wants to develop bud material.
Sorry, I wrote a book as a response.
