I mean I guess you can look at it that way. I mean shit, we have the hubble, so whatever you do in you home telescope setup will be nothing short of shit compared to that. /shrug
What I was trying to get at is not necessarily the setup or techical stuff, (but learning and perfecting the technical process is fun itself) but if you are a astro buff and like to look through telescope, a camera and astro tracker allows you to amplify what you see 100x with your naked eye. Because those long exposures, exposure stacking and tracker will basically capture billions more photons over time on a highly sensitive. So say you find some cool looking nebula cloud, you can just look at it naked eye and say cool, next...Photography and astro stuff is just the next step/leap from just gazing through the telescope. Its a hobby, just like any other hobby. You could say what you said about any hobby really. Why build that model car from scratch kit, when you can just go and buy a die cast professionally factory made one that looks 1000x better? Why try to make those smoked meats at home when I can just go out and get professopnally cooked ones on some BBQ place....
I dont do the telescope thing, but I do the wide field milky way at night, in some dark corner of the woods with no light pollution star photography. Just began a few years ago and getting better and better results the more I learn and read up on the process. Yep, my stuff is crap compared to some shit I see on the web, but its MY crap, created by me. And its also cool to involve my kids in it, summer, up in my N michigan cabin, staying up till 2-3AM taking the golf cart to some remote field in the woods, setting up and taking some shots while gazing at the beauty of the star filled sky at night.
