There seems to be a dichotomy between the font sizers favored by designers, particularly of Wordpress themes, and most readers: the former like smaller font sizes that look better when taken as part of the whole graphical packages, while the latter like larger fonts. I remember Joel Spolsky saying somewhere that he thought part of the reason Joel on Software succeeded in attracting visitors was/is because of its large font relative to many other software development websites. He was joking—but only in part.
Incidentally, the small font size defaults caused me to buy the CSS upgrade at Wordpress for The Story's Story at http://jseliger.com . You tell me if it looks better than most other Wordpress blogs you've seen based the size of its font.