I'm sure you are aware John that these days many well heeled amateurs have a quantity and quality of equipment that many struggling professionals would give their high teeth for because pro's have to justify the purchase of new equipment on the grounds of sales and potential profit, building up their bank balance not their equipment inventory. Many working pro's make their living with equipment with gear that most rank amateurs would scoff at, but because of their skill, photographic knowledge and experience can still produce good work with.
Not universally the case across the professional spectrum. It has been common for more than 20 years for working professionals to commercially lease a lot of equipment rather than buy it, allowing tax advantages in doing so. Certainly the few working professionals in wedding and corporate work I know of do this, as they are using digital systems costing upward of $60,000 baseline; when leased, there is very little financial pain and risk and amenable upgrade/expansion paths. Leasing does not cover staff of course, and the busier the studio the more staff often have to be taken on, and staff is one of the bigger financial quandaries of the bigger heavy-hitters in industry.
Of course, wealthy amateurs don't usually churn out very high quality work if they are spending a king's ransom on flash equipment. Some do, I know that cannot be denied (either they are gifted or they are really, really putting in the hard yards, additional to holding down a job that has nothing to do with photography, but a heap to do with powering it), but I don't see a consistent standard of quality work. I've observed this for many decades. My beef with this is that money should be spent on baseline skill development and knowledge, rather than the oft-held premise that expensive equipment "makes" one a pro. It does not. Never has and never will. This is old bogey is hard to avoid given it affects so many, many people — the starry, starry-eyed folks with oodles of money but not a skerrick of "professional" application and experience. It's particularly rampant in the digital sector, but the analogue lands do not escape its curse. Did anybody start with a Kodak Box Brownie and learn the ins and outs of concept, composition, emotion, feel and technical prowess, working their way up as their grasp of concepts became more refined. Well, that's what I di. I feel I can personally make a beautiful image irrespective of what camera or lens I am using (and my rav fav is a pinhole camera). That's the way I was taught, not to "spend first, imagine later".
