There's something to be said for limitations. I learned to drive linux on a old p100 laptop and floppy disk installs. It had very limited resources (you had to aggresively nice oggvorbis to play .ogg files without skipping). The hard drive was failing and I had to put it in the freezer from time to time to bring it to life.

Anyway working with those limitations was very educational.

Fast forward to today, I've been playing the baritone sax for 18 months. I got a cheap vintage instrument. I traded it in this week for a modern Yamaha, and it's so much easier to play, and the quality of my playing has gone up orders of magnitude. But then again the initial struggle with the sub-optimal equipment was very educational.