I brewed for about six years when I was in my 20s. I knew I'd finally arrived when I started getting annoyed because my friends would show up and drink all my beer. When you start out, everyone says your beer is good but they really want to drink something else; eventually you get to the point where it's as good as a microbrew that you can buy for eight or nine bucks at the beer store. At that point I felt like I had two options: ramp up to 10 or 20 gallon batches to make the time/money investment per beer more reasonable, or make use of the fine division of labor we enjoy in modern civilization and let somebody else make the beer while I did other stuff. I lived in a small apartment at the time, so I chose the latter. I still have all my gear; one day I'll take it back up.
The two steps I took that improved my beer the most dramatically were: A) going to an all-glass, two stage fermentation (Lots of folks believe in a quick fermentation in plastic followed by aging it in a carboy; all I know is I had a lot less disappointment once I moved to all glass. Maybe my plastic bucket just sucked.) and B) and more importantly, going to liquid yeast. Liquid yeast is expensive. But it was night and day compared to the packets of the dry stuff.
I would seriously consider telling a new brewer not to bother bottling at all. Bottling is a nightmare. Saving the bottles, washing the bottles, sanitizing the bottles, filling the bottles. It's awful. I think for the new brewer I'd recommend starting with
the Party Pig, which I had good success with. It's basically two big bottles per five gallon batch that you then get semi-draft beer from. The Grolsch-style bottles are way easier, but seriously: consider not bottling. If I ever start up again I'm going kegging-only.
Anyone who cares seriously about beer ought to brew for awhile. I can't tell you how much I learned about the process. It's like the guitar lessons I took in high school -- I never ended up in a band, and I barely got to the point where I was willing to let other people hear me play, but it's added an extra dimension to my enjoyment of music for my whole life. Absolutely worth it. It's even great before the beer's any good. There really is nothing like the feeling of craftsmanship you get the first time you're hammered on beer you made with your own hands.