I'm always late comer in a party, this is kind of 5 years late...
But to-the-point answer to this question would be that NUMBER OF QUERIES MATTERS LESS THAN TOTAL TIME TAKEN BY THE QUERIES.
If a large query with multiple joins and sub queries takes 20 secs to execute, then (I think) 20 small queries which take .20 secs in all are much better.
I find manage smaller queries much easier, well mainly because I cache every query, and I can reuse the data from that individual query again and again and again.....
