But the point I was trying to make is that IME the engineer is far more important than the equipment.
I learnt this the hard way having spent a large amount of money and time building my home studio only to find that the weak link was very much me. Sure my recordings made with Logic, a 40 channel digital desk, big Tannoy monitors and a multitude of effects both hardware and software were technically better than the ones I had done on a 4-track portastudio, but not by a massive amount and they were still nowhere near what I was aiming for.
This was very much brought home to me when with another band we used a very ordinary looking studio with what was technically an inferior system to the one I had at home, but the engineer was able to get a recording that sounded excellent in a fraction of the the time it would taken me to achieve something that merely sounded good.