Ignore some of the subtle elitism inherent to this conversation -- the encoder you're using is probably more than adequate for excellent sounding mp3s. It's MusicMatch or AudioCatalyst, right? Anyhow, you'll find that 100% VBR gives you files of approximately the same size as files created at 192 kps. A single album will be about 100 MB. This will vary from album to album, of course, but this is a generalization that seems to hold in real life.

I find the size to be totally acceptable and the sound quality meets CD quality to my ears.