I've identified maybe five different styles of checklists (including the airline variations). In the airlines, there's one style that I call the everything including the kitchen sink, and it is (was?) philosophically favored by the scandinavian airlines, among others. To my surprise, when I first read about it, an overly complete checklist can actually be detrimental to cockpit performance.
So if we get down to fundamentals, what does a checklist do? First, and this is not obvious, it is a concrete step indicating to the pilot a transition from one phase of flight to the next: after takeoff to cruise, cruise to landing, etc. Secondly, it reduces the odds of erroneous or undesirable control and switch positions for that next phase of flight.
Here's something for thought -- what controls absolutely must be correctly positioned for each phase of flight? Or to put it another way, what can you absolutely not afford to have wrong?
* Fuel pump, good form as a preventative measure, of course, but not absolutely necessary. If there's a problem, you'd check it real quick anyway;
* Trim set -- annoying if you forget but something you can handle.
You get the idea -- there are lots of things that are good form and belong on checklists that are not **absolute** necessities. (Please, no flame wars!)
United Airlines had all their B747-400 checklists on one, 8.5x11 sheet that lived atop the glareshield. Their checklist philosophy was that the two pilots would do their flow (each pilot checks everything on their side of the cockpit in a smooth motion of attention) and then the checklist would contain only the absolute necessities. Relatively speaking, extremely short checklists, but then again, their cockpits were very well organized so that flow worked. Way, way too many RV cockpits have terrible flows, meaning this switch here, then that knob over there, etc. In an ideal world, cockpit layouts are designed at the same time as cockpit flows and checklists. In an ideal world.
You get the idea -- checklist design has many, many components, but a longer checklist is not necessarily better.
My RV-9A checklists are all on one side of one laminated piece of paper, maybe 4" x 5". In sidebars, it has the V speeds (which I never look at) and an ILS checklist for the glass cockpit, because there are things there that *must* be done to set up the avionics properly. The back side contains terse avionics systems information, local frequencies (in case of brain fart), equipment serial numbers, summary weight and balance. I never have to turn pages to get to the correct checklist, and sometimes there's not a whole lot of time to do the checklist.
My current checklist is Revision 23 and in an ideal world, I'd be on Rev 24...