Good, worthwhile post.

The purpose is not just to train my intuition away from the "governments are intrinsically incompetent" that I currently have (and which is unjustified by objective evidence).

"Incompetent" is too strong perhaps. But I think it is safe to say that bureaucracies are intrinsically prone to certain inefficiences. And a large government, like in the US, would not be exempt.

So I'm asking if commentators want to share government success stories they may have come across.

"Success" is too vague. Success from whose perspective? And by what parameters?

I think what tends to happen in this sort of examination is that we would identify governments as the means of optimizing toward certain ends. Some policies are successful to 51% of the people in a country. Some are successful to all citizens of that country, whille being significantly detrimental to the rest of the world. Some make everybody equally ecstatic right now and doom the whole lot us in the future.

At least in terms of domestic impact, would it make sense to compare and contrast countries with relatively large governments against those with small governments? I posit that you'd see less of an answer to which size/style governement is best, and more a landscape of the sorts of consequences they tend to yield.