I didn't have much luck with Gorrillapod, didn't seem that rock solid stable as far as securing it
The photo blogs were touting Platypod for awhile, when I guess the company was paying them.
I went to NZ last month where it was very windy. I carried around my tripod for the first time during the day because I wanted to shoot more time lapses.
So my travel tripod is carbon fiber and folds to about 15 inches and extends to about 5.5 feet. What I did was just carry it around. Fold in the legs and retract the center column but not fold it all the way and put into a case. I just grabbed it by the ball head and went from place to place as I walked around. It's about 3 pounds or so.
Usually I pack it on every trip but leave it at the hotel unless I'm shooting stuff at night.
Now, I'm going to consider getting some kind of ballast to counteract the wind.
As far as the smallest ones getup, I thought about gimbals but those are definitely not small. I prefer making panos now for landscapes so I may consider some kind of robot pan-tilt head which would be controlled by an app. or maybe a drone.
But I saw some pictures posted using the Night Sight feature of the new Google Pixel phones. They take multiple pictures and blend together the most stable ones. The results looked very good.