The camera industry understands something about human psychology that bootstrapped creators often don’t: acquisition is more emotionally rewarding than production. Buying a new lens produces an immediate, clean feeling of capability expanded. Using the lens you already own to make something difficult and interesting produces something much slower and less certain — the extended effort of actual creative work. The industry profits from this asymmetry by continuously producing new equipment just differentiated enough to justify the upgrade while never quite fully closing the gap between what you have and what you wish you had.