Look everyone...this is so much FUD.
At the end of the day there needs to be miners and they need to be distributed...centralized mining is not a solution.
With that being said, the reason why people mine is completely inconsequential since someone has to do it.
Nuff sed.
Buy hardware secondhand if possible because it will likely not be price gouged. Everyone who gets this far who is still a newbie - please understand...ALL MINERS (SCRYPT/ASIC/SCRYPTJANE/BLAKE256) HAVE A COMMON INTEREST TO TELL YOU MINING IS NEVER PROFITABLE. Miner's have an incentive to tell everyone that it wont work so that they can stave off difficulty increases for at least a little longer. The idea is that as more people mine, the same amount of coins are released so as more people break into mining they all have to share from this same released cache of coins.
The OP has refused to tell you A) only buy in Fiat, B) once you've made how much you could have earned by just buying it, you now have essentially earned both your investment AND hardware that can continue to mine sha or scrypt.
As BTC price increases, it also pushes out the mining profitability threshold.
If you followed people's advice last august about how mining isn't worth it because XYZ are coming online with a ton of additional hashpower - you were suckered into NOT buying hardware because 3/4th of XYZ still never got delivered - hashfast, cointerra, and bitmine coincraft.
OP - Just curious, what is your exact definition of "all pro, neck deep"
100 GH? 1TH???
Also, you didn't mention the idea of "equilibrium" - By that I mean, eventually other profitable coins come around that are sha variants and the hashrate will chase profitability - if I thought I was ever mining at a loss, I'll be damn sure to switch to something that isnt.
Case and point - last month I spent a day on betacoin and gained .7 BTC that day instead of the expected .3 with my hardware - so yeap...the OP is absolutely correct, if an only if this was a perfect square world with consistent certainty.
OP should instead state - DONT BUY BTC GEAR with BTC UNLESS YOU ARE ABSOLUTELY CERTAIN IT BREAKS EVEN IN 60 days or so - its too wildly variable to guess difficulty due to the late nature of the expected hash-rate that is being promised above - we've seen pics of HF so no doubt that's real, we've seen KNC deliver so no doubt they are going to deliver.