A lot has been said about the size of Ike and has been used by SOME to rationalize why Ike never restregthened and became a cat4 or cat5.  In my opinion the size of Ike had very little to do with its ability to restrengthen.  There have been plenty of larger than life hurricanes that achieved 4 or 5 status, Katrina and Carla 61' come to mind.  Carla was the biggest storm ever recorded in the Atlantic basin and did achieve cat5 status.  So the size of the storm can not determine the windspeed, just as windspeed can not determine the size of the storm.  I think this was more of a environment and other factors that will be looked at for quite some time.  Dry air was in the gulf prior to the storm and never evacuated, which is typical of a more fall like pattern that we do see as we head to latter September and October.  The shear also never truely let up as was expected and kept the west side of the storm weak.  Cuba has done some wierd things to hurricanes this year, just look at Gustav who also never recovered after hitting our neighbor to the south. 
     If conditions would have panned out as the models siad they would, we would have seen a cat5 hurricane for a bit in the gulf, and a storm that would make landfall as a 4 instead of a 2, regardless of the storm size.