Hi Frostyricho! and welcome to IIS
The thing you will start to learn as you research telescopes is that there is no one scope that can do it all. Any design is going to be a compromise that sacrifices some features to gain others. The most obvious one is one you have already alluded to. In order to gain portability you often lose aperture.
Your budget is very limited at a maximum of $450 so the first obvious question that must be asked is how important is astrophotography to you? Imaging is a very expensive trail in most cases. Yes you can do it cheaply doing star trails, time lapses or if you are keen on manually guiding wide fields or doing eyepiece projections of the moon, but in most cases much higher budgets are required.
Motor drives sound OK but in lower end scopes they are not good enough to gain really good images.
My usual advice to beginners is to get a small is 6-10" dobsonian. It will have plenty of aperture to see lots of objects, uncomplicated construction so little can go wrong, easy to set up and use and allows you to edecide if this hobby is really for you before investing $'000s of your hard earned.
Cheers
Malcolm