I can feel myself falling into the great abyss already with this hobby, and I've only ever done 1 Mr. Beer kit that my mom got be for this past Christmas (Mom's are awesome, and so is Amazon for literally delivering beer to my door). Now I'm 1 partial mash in (scotch ale that somewhere along the lines veered off into becoming a scotch porter ale of some sort) and I'm looking at 3 different recipes (blue moon clone this weekend, barley wine for when I get my dad's carboy for bulk aging, and then either a cream stout or a chocolate oatmeal stout that will be ready for fall).
What's gotten me is, most of my jobs growing up I was cooking in kitchens/bars/restaurunts, and I learned to cook from my mom (seriously, this is probably the best skill to teach to your kids ever). So I spend time most nights of the week cooking dinner for myself and SWMBO, and it sort of occured to me, "I can make good food in little or no time with no recipes and I never measure anything, and I love craft beer, what's really stopping me from making my own beer so I can mold it to exactly the way I love beer". Ended up bringing a 1 liter bottle of my porterscotchale to a party on Saturday and all the BMC drinkers we're like "Holy **** you made this? How?".
Basically I'm doomed, and I blame my mom (I tell SWMBO to blame my mom since she bought me the Mr. Beer kit).
Also, its just like any other hobby I've gotten into. I build my own desktop computers, I could go buy the 500 dollar processor, but, really the 250 dollar one will be more than enough power for the next 3 years or so. I applied the same logic, I could have bought a nice carboy and all kinds of neat stuff for my first batch, but, I'll just collect things over time, see what I can find on Craigslist, see what I can MacGuyver into being usefull brewing tools. I'm mostly brewing for myself, SWMBO, and my friends, so I don't need to make GABF award winning beers (not that I wouldn't lose my mind if something I entered into a local contest was good enough to go all the way there).