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Honestly I don't believe in "sweet spots" for aperture as you are going to be entirely limited by the seeing at your observing site. The best most of us in Australia can hope for is a bit under an arc minute on a good night, unless you have an exceptional location such as near the AAO.
Given the seeing limitations, as long as you can reduce the Periodic Error of a mount to under 5 arc seconds you'll get a quality image. Far more important in a mount is no flexure and that means big heavy EQ mounts or well designed Alt-Az mounts and rotators.
Small apertures simply cannot capture enough photons, even using current techniques and CCD's. Compare a shot with a 100mm refractor vs a 1m Reflecting telescope and tell me which has more detail if exposures are identical and you use the same post image processing techniques.
Just my 2 cents worth. For the record I've been doing AP since the early 70s. Back then in the pre autoguider days AP was not for the faint hearted.
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