Not your target audience, but… Bright binoculars (10x50) have kept me happy for nearly a decade for half the price of those telescope options. I do want a telescope, but based on a small sample pool at astro parties, it’ll take notably more money to make it worth it to me.

Bino pros: cheaper, brighter, more portable, very little setup, two-eye comfort, terrestrial use, more durable, wider apparent field of view (bigger image), wider image field of view (more stars, easier navigation), prism optic to keep image upright

Bino cons: much less zoom/magnification capability for portable/affordable sizes, hard to see ~half of the messier catalog at all, and I frequently skip the tripod because ei can totally stand there for an hour with my arms holding 2lbs over my head steadily (hubris strikes again), and the combination of reduced zoom/smaller objects makes it harder to enjoy the viewss in Bortle class 5 light pollution or worse.

Pro to smart telescope: even if it’s aligned a little poorly, the tracking should keep targets in view for a several minutes. Untracked, they might only be there for a minute. Based on my experience with a ~80mm lens, ~1m long telescope. For me already being familiar and taking a dozen attempts to acclimate to the flipped image, I was able to keep it on target fairly well initially and continue to find new targets with a slight miss of the auto alignment.

I built a parallelogram mount. It’s rare for me to take it out on dark sky trips due to bulk of the mount and recliner chair, but when it’s out, the stability makes for a beautiful image. A regular tripod setup is tough to get views overhead, though a ball mount and counterweight on a 1m beam is an easy compromise

I do appreciate the one time I saw the Orion nebula from an Observatory through a ~24" dobsonian scope, but that’s a lightyear beyond my budget.