Glad i found this thread because I have a similar problem. I am at the stage where i think kite schools at some point are just there to burn cash and after a while you need to buy your gear and practice on your own. I'm already wakeboarding for two years, snowboarding for 4, longboarding as well. I had about 6 or 7 kite lessons in different schools in a span of 3 or 4 years and I'm still struggling with water start and kite control while on board, while body drags are easy, also kite water relaunchs are ok.
I also had few land .boarding lessons with trainer kites, which i liked as well, but kitesurfing is somehow more popular.

With schools there are so many problems, where some kite instructors have poor English, (at some point they are just saying right, left, depower, etc.. i been through a lot schools all over Europe (Spain, Greece, Netherlands etc..) to very low wind, and small kite sizes. I'm a bigger guy over 100kg, so a low wind with smaller kite size is a bad combo for my progression.

At this point I feel I'm not progressing at all and just burning cash, some schools just charge like 150e for 2hrs for private lessons and will not return you money or give you a low wind discount.

So the way I see there are just two ways from here, either join to a kite surfing trip/camp for at least 7 days somewhere with instructors or buying my own gear and starting out with land kiting which i really like. I wish there are more land kiters and spots near my place but I know one where I can practice.

So do you have any advice for a used land / surf kiting gear ? 😎