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You make some good points. The smart telescopes (particularly the Seestar) are very attractive to me because of the relative simplicity, but I wonder longer term whether a 'proper' telescope would be better. As a rank amateur with an interest it's hard to know what to go for
EB-
A 'proper' telescope gives you the thrilling sensation of actual photons from a distant planet hitting you square in the eyeballs, that is a pretty fucking awesome experience. If you never have I suggest you try it ASAP, local amateur astronomy club maybe?
My Pixel 5 has an astrophotography mode and I've had a lot of fun with just a tripod and my phone. The results weren't incredible but it did give me a taste for something a bit more. And the price on the Seestar is so tempting!
RonAsheton
Depends where you are, I was able to see the rings on Jupiter & the red spot from Crystal Palace with my pretty basic 130mm telescope (https://www.harrisontelescopes.co.uk/acatalog/skywatcher-heritage-130p-flextube-dobsonian-telescope.html).
Also managed to get some excellent sights of Saturn and its rings looking out the window of my kitchen in Peckham!
I'm very much a bit of a sceptic when it comes to the sorts of smart telescopes that have recently been posted in this thread. I do see the appeal, and it's cool that they're a sort of all-in-one image capture + image stacking device. But for me, I just want to look through a lens and/or mirror and see something, for lack of a better word, real.
Yeah, it's a bit annoying that my simple Dobsonian needs rotated in two different axes to keep track of a planet at any reasonable magnification, and there's always a bit of shaking as a result of moving it. But, seeing these things that are significantly larger than our own planet fall through space in real time is part of the magic IMO.
For me, and I don't want to come across all "Old man yells at cloud", but if you're using something like that just to take pictures of a nebula or whatever, it's probably a safe bet that someone with much better equipment has already taken much better photos of the very same thing you're looking at.
Again, absolutely horses for courses. But I'm very much on the simple/basic side of things, getting the planisphere out and trying to figure out what the hell I'm looking at is part of the fun.