Disclaimer :-
I own a Bridgeport but I'm Home Workshop Guy, not Model Engineer Bloke, and pretty much everything I do is in 12 inch to the foot scale AKA full size.
The primary attraction of a Bridgeport in a home shop is that it can handle pretty much anything that can be reasonably lifted onto the table by a solo worker and get a cutter into anything that can be put on 2D drawing comprehensible by an ordinary person. The really tricky stuff being left to the Deckel and Thiel fraternity!
As such a Bridgeport makes an excellent sanity check comparator before finally pulling the purchase trigger on a machine that you think will not only be able to do the jobs you envisage but also have some capability to cope with the unexpected.
The basic question being what can a Bridgeport do that my provisional choice can't.
It's easy to miss things when concentrating on spec sheets with the "can do" vision filter in place. Turning it round to make a "can't do" question relative to a hopefully over capable reference gives a different viewpoint to flush out any errors.
For example:-
"Do I need a 49 inch table when the largest parts I envisage are only 6 inches long?".
Probably not but setting parts up on an angle can seriously burn up table space. That one bit me when I thought a 28" table square column bench mill would do. Hence swopping in a Bridgeport. Of course now I have the bigger machine the work I do has expanded to meet capacity. I'll admit that a 14 ft long job was stretching the envelope a bit and relied heavily on a strategically positioned workshop secondary door!
It's quite likely that a smaller machine may be up to the job.
I was impressed by the metal removal capacity of the square column mill I had which was of very similar size to the aforementioned Sieg 3.5. Its rare that the Bridgeport gets worked harder, blizzards of chips I can live without, but it turned out that too many jobs just wouldn't easily fit.
At least if you do the analysis and find only a Bridgeport will do you will know why.
However you may also be inspired to figure out a different approach which, metaphorically, fits a quart into a pint pot. Normal territory for Model Engineers whose jobs are frequently much larger than industrial practice would put on a machine of the available size.
If you think that may be a possibility just ask here.
Someone will have done similar things with an officially too big part.
Clive