Gammajo, Hey . . . I'm with you. To echo just a couple of the points you mentioned, at least five pieces of my current rig were purchased from honorable fellow A'gon members. That doesn't include the other buys and sells that are now history.
I have leaned a great deal from many of the folks here too. One kinda interesting tidbit related to a suggestion made here to call a gentleman by the name of Tom Tutay of Transition Audio Design. Tom is one of the best unkept unsecrets out there. About 6 months or so back, I leaned that I was overloading the outputs of my linestage because the input impedance of my subwoofer was too low. Tom made a custom built impedance buffer device that summed L/R channels, lowered the load presented to my LS and corrected an asymetrical loading issue (Main 1 to amp was XLR and Main 2 to sub was SE).
And so forth and so on....
Let's not despair!!
Cheers.