My experience is that it depends a lot on your observing context.
I lived for five years in Washington, DC & New York, where the light pollution & atmosphere were both terrible. So I had a small Vixen refractor which I could carry up onto the roof of my apartment building. When I returned to Australia in 2005, I decided I had to have a light bucket to make the most of the southern sky. So I built 10" and 14" dobs in fairly quick succession.
An optically excellent 10" dob is a great balance between portability and aperture. But as this thread illustrates, there are many ways to skin this particular cat (that's 'cat' as in feline, not 'catadioptric'
).