I much prefer doing stuff in person so that you don't teach yourself bad habits. We know a great massage therapist who also teaches yoga... but she's the one who tried to sell me bikram in the first place. We'll see what that looks like after the 1st of the year. Dunno. I'm a lot less salty after some legit R&R. 
Fair - everyone has different approaches to trying stuff out/learning new things. My personal motivator is "get into it cheap to see if I'm going to stick with it, then look into upgrading gear." (The girl's approach is "Buy the best gear ASAP" so you can tell that people's "different, but totally acceptable and up to their personal comfort levels" methods for approach have come into my view already.)
Definitely fall in between on this. "Get something good enough to not hate this because my gear sucks, could last a decent amount of time before needing to upgrade, but also isn't high end/current year models."