Dinner plates make the most sense for households that cook real meals most nights and want the table to feel a little considered without any fuss, apartments with small kitchens included, since a good plate does a lot of visual work on its own. If your meals are mostly eaten standing at the counter or out of containers, or you genuinely only ever need two at a time, a full set is more cabinet space than most people have to spare, and that's fine to admit.
Size is where people get it wrong most often. A plate that looks right in a shop display can be too big for a cabinet shelf or too small for the kind of dinners you actually cook, rice and beans and a protein and something green, which needs real surface area. Measure your cabinet depth first, not just the width, because plates stack taller than you think and a half inch over on diameter means they stop fitting under the shelf above. For most tables, something in the ten to eleven inch range for dinner plates handles everything from pasta to a full plate at a holiday meal, with a smaller companion plate for salads or dessert. Skip anything with a pronounced rim or sculptural edge unless you've actually held one with food on it, because the mistake is buying for how it looks on a shelf, not for how it balances on a lap when there isn't room at the table.
On color, plain white or a soft off white earns its keep because it goes under any food, any tablecloth, any mismatched glassware you've collected over the years, and it photographs fine without you trying. A warm stoneware glaze in a creamy or speckled finish is forgiving of chips in a way that pure white shows up immediately. I'll say the honest thing about bold patterned plates: they're lovely for about six months, then you're tired of looking at a giant sunflower every time you eat toast. Where dinner plates genuinely fall short is delicate hand painted or gold rimmed pieces that can't go in the dishwasher or the microwave, those are for display cabinets, not for a Tuesday, and if a set demands hand washing after every meal, that's a real cost you're paying every single day, not just once.
The detail that makes a plate worth having isn't the pattern, it's the weight in your hand when it comes out of the cabinet, substantial enough that it doesn't feel like it'll crack if your kid sets it down too hard, light enough that carrying four at once from the stove to the table doesn't feel like a chore.
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