Budgets usually have tighter limits than wish lists. What strategies can be used to avoid wasting money on equipment?
By "wasting", I mean spending on an expensive item of photography equipment to solve a problem and then finding it frequently fail at solving well the problem it was supposed to tackle. The inability should be attributable to the product's design, not breakage of a specific item or inexperience with such gear.
I felt a recently closed question about useless accessories had some potential for taming the widely spread constant need for new equipment and bringing out some marketing hype, so I'll try to ask a similar question in a more constructive way.
common knowledge
. We don't really need or want anecdotes here...we need something more concrete. I'd prefer to delete this question, and if it MUST be asked, then craft the question properly so that we don't get a bunch of anecdotal answers while it is reiterated and refined.