Alternatively, Radare (http://radare.org/r/) is being adopted more widely as an open source tool to do similar analyses. Again: not-very-intuitive unless you know what you're doing, at which point it becomes very intuitive. The learning curve is steep here.

Eh, Hex-Rays eased up on the licensing a lot in the past few years, IIRC, and it's much more tolerable for individuals. These days, from what I understand, as long as you basically email them from your corporate, work email address -- they'll let you purchase a permanent, individual license that way, even with their digital downloads. So you don't need physical shipment or anything like that, they just need to make sure they aren't sending it to a rando email address.

In the past it was a lot more difficult since as an individual they'd want to physically ship you the software on disk, so they'd only send it to offices, trusted addresses, etc which complicated it a lot. I never really had to deal with this since I think their strategies changed a bit by the time I got licenses at my last job.

Of course, just emailing them from your work addr won't totally cut it -- you also have to pony up the few thousand USD to get IDA, and near $10k if you want all the decompiler tools, as well... IDA Pro itself is relatively 'cheap' by itself if you just want disassembly, though, and you actually do it for a job.

... and that last 20% proficiency will take until the heat death of the universe. It'll be fun trying though, and you'll learn lots of really cool things.