First, the definitions of map size do cause some heated discussions until its dicovered that they have very different ideas of things like "small" and "large". You might take a galnce at a write-up I did on the subject.
http://www.dom2minions.com/maps.shtml
Actually your poll looks like it got pretty close.
In general people tend to prefer the smaller maps. They dont get alot of discussion that way because small-medium maps are the size that can be dome manually. So most of them have names and people declare their love by saying the name of the map. Really big maps are hard to do manually. Most of them are done as ugly random generates so they dont tend to have names.
And yes big maps create an imbalance. Small maps create an imbalance. Long maps, plains/woodlands, water, mountains, design of the province borders... all of those in a map can give an advantage to one nation over others. The game is very complicated and the perfect "chess board" fair balanced tournament map would be very VERY difficult to create.
[ May 26, 2004, 15:15: Message edited by: Gandalf Parker ]