Reloading ease and speed are very poor. Reloading an NAA mini-revolver requires disassembling the gun and cannot be accomplished in any sort of combat-appropriate time frame. The autos are faster and easier to reload, but they're only "fast" compared to other guns in the class.

Officer's-size 1911s like this 9mm custom job from Cylinder & Slide Shop define the lower limit of middle-weight territory.

Pocket guns are, by definition, slow to draw. Having the gun rattling around in the bottom of a pocket, or even inside a pocket holster, requires inserting your hand through a possibly narrow and tight pocket mouth to get to the piece and does not make for the fastest draw in the world.

Having said all that, it's worth noting that people do occasionally save their lives with pocket guns. For some people these may be honestly the largest guns they can carry.

SUBCOMPACTS
Subcompacts are considerably larger than pocket guns. While they're small and light enough to simply be dropped into a pocket, they require a holster for best use. They are usually chambered for more serious cartridges than pocket guns and are the largest guns that lend themselves well to carry in ankle and pocket holsters.

I place the five-shot Smith & Wesson J-frame .38 snubbies and equivalent guns from other makers in the subcompact class, though they've been dropped loose into a lot of pockets over the years. To my mind, the classic Colt Detective Special, while often discussed as tactically equivalent to the S&W J-frame, is enough bigger that it crosses the line from subcompact into being a compact belt gun.

The .38 snubbies have their virtues, primarily a great size-to-power ratio. While many new gun carriers wind up with .38 snubnose revolvers for exactly that reason, the same thing makes these guns more suited to the expert than the new/casual shooter. There's not enough weight here, even in all-steel examples of the breed, to dampen .38 Special recoil to a level a novice can handle. Go from steel to a lightweight aluminum or even lighter titanium or scandium frame and the recoil problem gets progressively worse. Grips are tiny, thus they don't offer much to hold onto. Installing oversize grips helps, but it compromises the small size that makes these guns so attractive. Sights are tiny, trigger pulls typically stiff.

I'm not saying good shooting can't be done with .38 snubbies. It's just that doing so requires more skill than most people possess. These guns' small dimensions make reloading them, even with speedloaders, a slow proposition.

I am not a fan of small-frame .357 Magnum revolvers, at least when actually loaded with .357s. Stuff 'em with .38s, however, and they're about as good as, well, a .38. I've heard, "Oh this is a great idea for a last-ditch, close-range, belly-to-belly defense gun." Let me put it to you this way: The only people who think these guns are really cool are those who've never fired them.

When Glock introduced its "baby" Models 26 in 9mm and 27 in .40 S&W, some writers rushed to claim that the Smith & Wesson J-frame was therefore obsolete. I disagree. Wishful thinking aside, the G26/27 (and the later G33 in .357 SIG) are quite a bit larger than a J-frame, so much so that I rate them not as subcompacts but in the larger compact class.