re: Not a small telescope
For well equipped amateurs who are willing to continuously scan the same part of the sky.
I know an amateur who did discover a supernova that way, though, and he has an observatory at home and it's his computer that saw it first.
It was rewarding for him, definitely.
(Years ago, I decided to learn how to use html here, made a few mistakes then, but I never returned back to the simpler way of copying and pasting an url.
This saves the reader 4 or 5 more operations to open that link).