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I think that that's mostly just a water quality issue. And also a "how experienced of an aquarist am I" issue. Like, I would be willing to assume that a yellow clown goby (G. okinawae) could do quite well in a 2.5 gallon tank IF the tank was plumbed to a larger system to handle wastes, temperature swings, etc. The problem with picos, is more due to their inherent instability with such a small water volume, as opposed to the space they provide (assuming you're working with a suitable species).Haha. It's entirely possible the information I got was wrong. This was quite a while ago and the info originally came from a LFS and then I googled. Sure there were some that mentioned smaller tanks but most said larger for happy peas. I stopped looking at that point because I wanted happy peas so didn't look further into them. LOL
Then someone on here was asking for fish for a 5g (or maybe it was a 7g). This had me reading the thread because I've been looking at starting a pico or small nano. A couple small gobies were mentioned and I thought "great" there is something other than shrimp that can be kept in tanks that small. When I googled the tank size for one of them it was minimum 10g. I think the goby was the size of a dime. Haha. I haven't done any further research into them so maybe they can be happily kept in something smaller.
Even some of my freshwater gobies who are in tanks larger than the minimum look like they'd be even happier in tanks that are larger based on the pacing they do. I suspect they wouldn't stop roaming at 3' in the wild and they are tiny gobies.
It's also a "how much do I know about this fish" issue. With site-attached fish (like the yellow clown goby, and the Trimma goby that Tired mentioned), they don't really move that much, and stick around their host coral (usually acroporas) their entire life. But with the Stiphodons (and other freshwater gobies), I bet it's a matter of space due to feeding (aufwuchs/biofilms, right?). So they need that large amount of surface area in order to get the food they need. And they're probably also used to sometimes being blown quite far based off of the rivers/streams/waterfalls they're on.