Nutty, I've got both, a skid steer and a dozer and I've rented larger dozers and track hoes. My skid steer is a medium sized one with wheels. I would never consider using it for anything where soft ground is involved. My dozer is a very small JD350 which is about equivalent to a D3 I think. I have a friend who has the largest tracked Bobcat with the high sprocket. I can easily compare his Bobcat to my dozer because we've done several projects together. Whenever he needs a job done that involves digging up virgin soil or moving very much of it he asks me to bring my little dozer. He needed a road bed and associated ditches built on high ground. It was about 300 feet long. I did this with my dozer in one long day. He figured it would have taken him a week with the Bobcat. Another time he needed a road built on one end of his pole barn with the dirt from the ditches going into the barn to build up the floor. I used the dozer to dig the ditches and pushed the dirt into the pole barn. He used his skid loader to spread the dirt inside the barn. The distance I pushed the dirt ranged from just outside the pole barn to about 150 feet away. He couldn't keep up spreading the dirt inside the barn. I would have the 12 foot wide door blocked with a pile of dirt and then had to wait for him to catch up before I could push more in. We finally gave up on the skid loader and I did the whole job with the dozer. The dozer can't be beat for digging, the bobcat is great for loading, and I use a hydraulic dump trailer for hauling. Even the biggest skid loaders do not dig holes very well and the tracked ones have too much ground pressure and low ground clearance that they get stuck real easy in soft stuff. I researched every angle of this issue and concluded that I needed , a digger, a loader, and a hauler. If you have acreage and are prone to dirt moving projects I think a track hoe could take the place of the dozer and loader. The track hoe can reach in and dig where even the dozer can't go. I think for small ponds less than 1 acre where there is no immediate flooding to deal with and you don't need to move the dirt very far from the digging site then I'd dig it with a dozer alone. The track hoe is obviously a great digger but you still need the dozer to pile the dirt out of the way unless your pond is no bigger than the track hoe can reach. With a dozer you can dig and push into piles using one machine. If the dirt needs to be moved more than 200 feet or so then I'd probably go with the track hoe right off the bat and scoop it straight into a trailer or dump truck. I concluded that if you need to move dirt a long ways the best bet is the track hoe (it digs and loads) and a hauler (actually a scraper is even better but it won't go into soft places). If you don't need to move it a long way then a dozer does the whole job by itself. The pond I just dug was in wet sand but not flooded, it was about one half acre, and I know I dug it quicker with just a dozer than I could have with a track hoe unless I also had a dozer and two operators.

Gotta get back to fishin!