[krisgee]

>but for the average coffee connoisseur, excellent equipment is attainable for a few hundred dollars.

I think this is generally true of most hobbies (jokingly it's what I use to define a hobby, something that you can, but don't have spend at least 1000 USD on).

To pick one I recently started on you can get started brewing beer for under 100 dollars. You can get perfectly acceptable, even excellent beer using basic equipment. Then, if you want you can go out and spend thousands of dollars on pressure transfer equipment, kegging tools, stainless steel fermenters and etc.

But you don't have to.