I have owned a 1/2 dozen garden variety XT6/XT8 Dobs over the last 25 years. None of them were anything special, but they were consistently OK. I also simultaneously owned a sensibly perfect 4” APO and a custom 8” Dob with Zambuto optics.
The 6”f8 Dob consistently gave me better views of all objects than the 4” APO. The 8”f6 Dob consistently gave better views of all objects than the 6”f8 Dob. The 2” difference wasn’t a “wow,” but it was obvious.
The custom 8” Zambuto equipped Dob gave marginally better views than the 8” Synta Dob in excellent seeing, but the difference in the views was much more subtle than the difference that comes with 2” of extra aperture, which is why I would expect a typical, garden variety 10” Dob would probably give better views of anything than a sensibly perfect 8” Dob and cost much less
For reference, a complete XT10 costs $600 and is available off the shelf. An 8” Zambuto mirror starts at $1,100 with an 11 month lead time. A Zambuto equipped 8” Teeter starts around $3,300 with a 4 month lead time.
I don’t want to deal with the weight/bulk, cooling requirements, collimation tolerances, and coma of a 10” scope, so I might be willing to pay the much higher cost of sensibly perfect 8” optics again someday, but only after making sure that every other aspect of the scope was as sensibly perfect as I could make it before addressing incremental optical quality improvements.
Edited by gwlee, 16 April 2018 - 01:59 PM.