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While I know it was the original and they didn't know it was going to be the franchise it turned into, I know all the meta reasons they were like what they were. I want in universe reasons.

Why were the Eggs and facehugger so small? It was an Engineer ship. Either Engineers were turned into ovamorphs, or a queen burst out of the jockey and laid them. Either way, shouldn't they have been sized for Engineers instead of humans?

I know they could have been a payload meant for a planet of human sized hosts, but why bother with xenomorphs when they could have just goo bombed them?

What are your thoughts/ideas?

Moderator Action: Moved the thread to the GM Only section because the discussion can be seen as spoilers.

The only example of Big Eggs I can think of this morning before coffee is the chest-high monsters in Prometheus - which could simply be a result of David's meddling.

In ALIEN, the eggs found are about 1meter high and we don't know their source unless you include the restored cocoon scene from the ALIEN Special Edition then you get the view that an alien can implant a facehugger embryo into a victim who turns into an egg (aka Brett and Dallas).

From ALIENS, the size of the egg is purely a function of the Queen laying them and they ended up about the size you see in ALIEN as well.

One kind of egg described above makes sense to (possibly) be sized to the scale of the victim: if a xeno implants a human - human-sized egg results but implant an engineer and *maybe* get a larger egg.

Given the egg only needs to be big enough to hold and launch a facehugger - there's not any real reason they need to be all that much bigger.

An implanted engineer could still be "digested" down to the size of a human-size egg and anything extra just left behind.

And with that - we get to the core question of your post: "why xenos instead of goo?" or its other version: "why goo instead of xenos?"

Pre-supposing the "engineered weapons of mass destruction to purge planets" one possible "doctrine of Engineer warfare" emerges:

The goo is a local "infection" event that results in a larger scale planetary "infestation" where the xenos are essentially a meta-scale form of viral agent for reworking the planet's biosphere.

So then you wonder - how does that warfare doctrine square with the first engineer drinking golden goo to seed life on Earth?

The implication seems to be that the goo and the xenos eventually die off / time out / otherwise evaporate and disappear leaving a near barren planet and paving the way for the new life seeding sacrifice of the golden goo.

I'd have to go back and re-read all the stuff cut from Prometheus to see if anything in the translated engineers carvings and such contain any real clues.