I prefer the miniturization, once I've gotten to medium hulls. That way,you have a good sized ship, but you can upgrade it as things get smaller. I had some medium hulls that I kept upgrading so that by the time I finished they had about 130 hp each (much more then a large hull starting out), but with smaller compnents they also kept up the firepower escalation.

You said it yourself! There are pros and cons to each, and its really which you'd rather go with. Want to take ground by force early while the AI is busy? Go Go Miniaturization! Prefer to dig in and tech / production whore, and build a meaner military later on? Rock out with the larger hulls.

If you adapt this trade-off into your overall strategy, you can easily get AT LEAST medium hulls before it starts to hurt you, or increasing miniturization returns with further, reasonably cheap tech.

That being said, medium and large hulls are such a HUGE jump, I can then afford to set size research aside for a while and focus on better (read: smaller) weapons and armor.

Of course a true tech whore can get both.......

I prefer large ships for offense and small ships + military starbase for defense. Obviously miniturization is a big help for both so I generally get miniturization first for my planet defenders and larger hulls later for my offensive fleets.

You don't need either of them, just get 2 military resources and BAM you ROCK!

I suppose everyone's got a preference, I typically try to spread my research out to cover multiple bases, but tend to take larger hull designs later. Maybe a little slower getting there, but once it's done, it's hard to beat. Miniaturization doesn't do you any good if you haven't researched more efficient weapon and engine designs, IMO.

A fleet of 4 Small fighters packing 15 damage (Last Phaser x3), speed 11 (Last Warp Engine x2), and 1.7 range works pretty dern good against any single ship, no matter the size. 'Corse, that'll change as I get newer weapons in the Campaign mode.

Once you've got (somewhat) disposable small fighters flitting around your systems holding the AI at bay, you can research and build larger ships to really put the hurt on, and divvy up those experienced Small ships with heavier mediums or large ships to act as brute force bashers.

I guess no matter what you want to do, cranking the research to 70% and letting the social/military sit at 15% each helps get you there faster. I'll always take a hit in productivity to start to gain a technological edge early and keep it.