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Hi, Gary! You always take me so seriously. :-) 
 1 You've defined 'large, medium and small' in reference to FIDE. Okay,
then I stand by my initial statement. ;-)
 2 On women, children, and early computers: When I did a bit of research
on 6x6 a while back, as well as Los Alamos Chess, I ran into variants from
the 1800's that were specifically designed as easy chess for the ladies
and (precocious?) children. First, I will say, for the record, I am a New
York liberal, living smack dab in the middle of the NY metro area, on the
east bank of the Hudson River. Then I will (gently) point out that the
line you object to was sarcastic, and that NY liberals (even if they are
only fake liberals and don't really mean it) are not likely to seriously
espouse such a position. Second, after the 2 extremely bitter and
hard-fought draws I've played against zcherryz, if you think I'd
seriously maintain men are innately better than women at chess, you're
crazier than I am. And as far as kids, I'm 58. I have a 32 year-old son
and a daughter who will be 25 in 25 days, and comes off our car insurance!
As far as I'm concerned, probably most of the people on this site are
kids. And I can tell ya, I'm certainly not beating them all. :-)
On the serious side, we do have a few points of agreement, in that we both
apparently feel (from what you said) that 8x8 is actually the smallest
decent size for a game. [Before the winners of the 44, 43, 42... square
contests kill me en masse, let me admit to a number of awesome small
exceptions discussed some other time.] And we can agree to call 10x10 and
20x20 'large'. But I still maintain that a large board gives much
greater scope for elegant simplicity. Too many pieces can muddy the theme;
you might as well play a wargame. [I design those, too.]
As always, these discussions with you get me thinking. Enjoy! Joe