I'd suggest saving your $$$ and going for a non-goto Dob myself, but then I'm very much a visual observer and number of photons matters more than GOTO capability for me! I started with a little refractor then moved quickly onto an 8" dob, and that gave me many years of quality observing (in Scotland), and could easily fit into the car for travelling to a darker sky site. I've loaned an 8" scope here in Oz and it's quite enough to track down a lot of the objects on John Bambury's list of 600 southern skies deep sky objects.
The pros are: speed and ease of setup, low cost (meaning plenty spare cash for good eyepieces and any other accessories), and little to go wrong. Speed of setup can't be underestimated, especially if there's a high chance of clouds or other distractions. The only significant mechanical problem I ever had in 20 years observing with my Dob was my secondary detaching from its mount and colliding with my primary mirror around the 19th July 1994
- I remember that because it was my first chance to observe the impacts of Shoemaker-Levy 9 onto Jupiter! Much swearing and a hasty repair later I did get to see the amazing impact scars, before sending the chipped primary and secondary for repair a few days later - I got a new mirror free as it was the glue holding the secondary to the holder at fault
- but this is certainly not a common problem!
The cons are that you will have to learn about the sky a bit in order to find the things you want to look at, but this is surely a good thing, right? By finding your way about the sky it'll become like an old friend each time you see it, and you'll get to find all sorts of hidden gems, and get the rewards of successfully star-hopping to a good deep-sky object! It gives you a much better 'feel' for how objects relate to each other in the sky, which is absent if you just type in the number and press 'go'. You will also need some star charts, ideally those that show down to 8th mag stars or so, as they'll be the ones that show up in a 30mm or 50mm finderscope. 6th mag will do for finding a fair few obects, especially as you learn the constellations (if you're not already familiar with the main ones). A magnifying finder is pretty much essential from suburban skies, where fainter stars are not visible for the zero-power finders. If you don't like the idea of star-hopping with charts (e.g. if you find map-reading a nightmare then lots of time with star charts may not be ideally for you?), then obviously a goto scope will largely eliminate this need, so long as you know what you want to find.
But it all depends on what you want to look at of course!