I'm newer to this than most of you, but chasing wattage and not understand speaker sensitivity were the two biggest for me at first. Once I got that out of the way, the next revelation for me recently is the quality of DAC. A/B testing was a bit shocking. When I do upgrade, I could see myself stretching more for one than I would on an amp.
Happen to you? Gear chasing because the fundamentals were wrong.
Gear chasing and swapping can be a real joy or a real pain.
The search for "better" or just the search for the "right fit" or sound.
One thing I've learned (with some difficulty) is that there are some fundamentals which have to be in place if anything else is going to be accurately assessed.
Of these, amp-speaker synergy and room acoustics were the most obvious factors I neglected. Noise and isolation were also missed as critical, early on. I blamed components which really were not the cause or the solution to the situation because I was missing the fundamentals.
I'm curious to hear anecdotes of your discovery.
What fundamental did you fail to pay attention to which caused you to chase gear unnecessarily?
Hopefully, these stories will be instructive, especially for newer audiophiles.