At the meeting Wednesday, I didn't recognize her until she spoke. There are apparently friendships of years-long standing among amateur astronomers in which neither party would recognize the other because they've never seen each other in broad daylight. We've had warm nights when everything cooperated except the clouds. There's a saying among amateur astronomers, Aperture Rules. That's right, as far as it goes.
Larger aperture means more light gathering ability, more objects visible, and higher resolution.
But it also means a larger, heavier instrument that's difficult to move and set up. Something small, light, relatively inexpensive, and easy to set up. That gives you a focal length of around 500 mm, which just isn't long enough to be practical for planetary or lunar viewing using eyepieces of reasonable focal length. And even if you Barlow them and use a very short eyepiece for higher magnification, their image quality breaks down dramatically beyond 75X or so, whereas you really need at least 175X to 225X for planetary and Lunar work. Since what I want a quick look scope for is the gas giants, Mars, Luna, and so on, a fast focal ratio is a bad idea.