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Hi Trido!
I heartily recommend you progress straight to the 10 or 12 inch dob (and in so doing echo the remarks of many others who have posted).
You will enjoy a great number of deep sky delights from where you live in that size scope. My first scope was 10 inches, and I spent many, many blissful hours touring the skies sampling many hundreds of beautiful objects from my backyard in relatively light-polluted suburban skies. My favourites with that sort of aperture are open clusters, double stars and globular clusters. With an OIII filter you will also be able to track down many planetary nebulae, which may be of interest to you. I always found galaxies and emission/reflection nebulae rather less noteworthy with 10 inches, but even then, if I travelled out to darker skies, the brighter of these objects would come out into their own as well.
One of the biggest issues will actually be being able to locate the objects in the first place. For that reason, having some sort of go-to functionality would be very useful if you are not likely to have much face-to-face contact with fellow amateur astronomers in your area. If you are getting a dob, you cannot go past getting an Argo Navis computer as an add-on. The maker of the Argo Navis is a member of this forum (Gary), and he could not be more helpful in getting you set up. This will enable you to readily access all of the objects you could ever hope to see in a 10 inch scope (its database is 30,000 objects, including all of the major catalogues, etc). On the other hand, you could get an SCT from Meade or Celestron. Such a unit is more expensive, and objects are not quite as bright as a dob inch for inch, but they are very easy to setup and use and so for a complete newbie like I was, they are fantastic.
Good luck with whatever you end up purchasing. Just make sure you leave enough $$ for some eyepieces!
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