All very important to keep in mind, Goraman. I'm glad you made those points. The trouble for me, as I've been down that road of tweaking things when I needed to make a significant change, is that you don't know what you don't know. This is probably the biggest issue for novices or those without the technical engineering background to know crap marketing when they see it. Unfortunately, these online forums merely fan the flames of desire most of the time. If you call people out on their crap marketing, it becomes a pissing match, and the novice/amateur is left wondering who to trust. Ultimately, it ends up being a lot of trial and error and building up of experience. At least that's what my experience has been.
I'm disadvantaged in living two hours outside of Kansas City, the nearest major metropolitan area. I think there's only one or two dealers in the whole area, and I just don't have the chance to check out stuff in-person. In my case, the internets giveth in terms of access to a profound diversity and wealth of equipment options, but they taketh in the difficulty of discerning truth from fiction, as well as in figuring out whether my tastes/ears have anything in common with the reviewer or forum post author.
