So far, I just deal with the annoyance. It is indeed only a <5 minute operation, but it's just a pain (shut services down, shut instance down, resize, start instance, start services).
The problem is it's the exact kind of pain that I avoid, so many times I just keep the larger (8-core) instance up and just eat the cost. I should probably script this to solve this pain point, but I'd SO rather have a setup that doesn't require this sort of jiggering.
