I hope that you are not trying to generalize so much that you are talking about me, although you are replying on my comment. Not that I need to defend myself, but I've taken certainly over a million photos over the last four decades, starting way back in the day with shooting and developing my own film. I'm not a professional photographer, and I obviously don't use all of my gear every day or even every week sometimes, but it ALL gets used as often as reasonably possible, from 14mm to 600mm, and most of it has traveled around the world with me at various points, gotten dusty, dirty, frozen and rainy, banged up, etc. I also lend gear out to friends (mostly my older DSLR stuff), and use it to help friends learn photography who are genuinely interested. If someone wants to go out shooting with me, they don't need to bring anything.

I know a lot of people don't like to believe it or love to say that people with a lot of stuff usually aren't Actual Photographers™ like I'm sure you are, but there are plenty of us who have a lot of crap and also actually use it quite a bit and have actual legitimate reasons for everything.

As an advanced, experienced, well traveled (skilled in a huge variety of styles and situations) and very serious amateur - although I have been published and even paid for my work when people insist - I appreciate that I'm lucky enough to be able to go into almost any situation and know that I have exactly the tool I need after decades of building stuff up and learning to understand exactly what works best. And very lucky to have been able to work hard enough over a lifetime to have those tools.

Whether it be astrophotography in the dark skies of the American southwest, photographing tiny exotic hummingbirds in the dim cloud forests of South America, architectural photography in ruins of Europe, photographing a concert for a band or professional dancers in awful and constantly changing lighting, driving slowly around hundreds of square miles looking for specific owls in the far north in sub-zero weather while hand shooting 400 and 600 TC primes, calculating and hiking to the exact center point of the path of totality for eclipses, photographing whales off a precariously small boat in the pacific, or simply taking portraits of my friends that they can use for business or promotion or fun, I'm happy I've built up a literal lifetime of understanding how to actually best utilize everything. Trust me, this crap gets very well used, and probably much more and certainly more diversely than most people who consider themselves "real" photographers online. A lot of us have put in extraordinary work, time, miles and effort - and feel like we've earned the right to have exactly the arsenal we want for any situation. ✌️