I used to do PA for one of my bands. Big is fabulous, but small is truly beautiful. It is beautiful when you are loading your car to go to the gig, it is beautiful when you are loading into the venue, it is beautiful when you are loading after the gig and it is SUPER beautiful as you unpack the car at 3am when you get home. Cos you cannot leave it in the car because it will get stolen. It also means you do not have to be driving a truck to carry everything. If the band buys and carries individual bits then that is bigly beautifuller still because you all share the load both moving wise and financially.
Passive speakers and cabs are great but - added bulk to move around. More faff setting up.
Analogue desks are great cos you can see everything, but digital is small, super versatile and does what you would need a 10U rack of outboard to do with an analogue desk.
Chuck a Samson headphone amp and some headphone extension leads into the mix (er case) and you can IEM for really not much money (£35 per head). And not carry wedges around. That is beautiful as well. And they are cheaper than wedges.
A decent pair of active Studiospare/Mackie/Yamaha/QSC/RCF/other things would do really good things. Go the sub route as well by all means. The amount of bands I have seen which were just too loud for the venue are myriad. Musos often want everything at the max. Punters really do not dig that in the pub. If you do a gig in a bigger venue hire a PA in. No point in owning enough kit to do Wembly but use it twice a year and store it for the rest of the time. Space cost money.
Yes, I have string feelings about this topic.