Yep, ditto, except my realization came from a JBC encounter at work. I had to learn this meta lesson several times the hard way, because media portrayals lie and I had nobody to tell me different.

    Learn Good Tools -> Learn Bad Tools

is easy

    Learn Bad Tools -> Learn Good Tools

is hard. Learning has nonlinear difficulty in the number of variables and bad tools introduce distraction variables. Unless you literally can't afford the good tools, "survey professionals and then buy once cry once" is almost always the right approach.