Let's put it this way -- I bet you didn't buy most of your stuff in July (nevermind August) or you would NOT have broken even by now, especially with the extra, non-necessary hardware you mentioned purchasing.
I slowly built up, starting in late May, and I'm still only 74% paid off.
Yeah, anyone buying in as a BTC miner from July will have not have made their money back, and will take a good long time doing so, but they can
1) monitor the different cryptocurrencies and move to the most profitable
2) take risks by buying the currencies and hope they go up in value (the best way to make money... but takes balls of adamantium)
That's exactly what I have done since getting in on this at the start of April. Just need to keep on monitoring the market, and take the odd calculated risk or two with funds you can afford to lose.
It was the NMC bonanza way back that made my money back on my equipment. Luckily I had discovered it some weeks beforehand, and took a risk on gathering a good amount of coin. Then people on this forum found out about it and slowly but surely the message spread, then NMC mining went through the roof and so did the price. Amazing! I made a crazy amount of money in that time. Then there was the two day boost we had with NMC... made a nice bit then.
And just recently, the SLC run gave me another nice lot of money... made a couple of hundred on IOC as well, but that does not look too healthy at the moment. It needs far better promotion and support. I completely missed the IOX one, if there was one.
Just in case anyone is interested, SLC has been halted for 2 weeks while security updates are applied http://solidcointalk.org/topic/211-solidcoin-shutting-down-at-block-35250/
I think you can still mine coins, but all the ones you gather after block 35250 are not counted.
One thing that amazes me, AngelusWebDesign, is that this whole crypticurrency thing is still an earner. I would have bet that it would have been dead by now. For miners at least.
At the moment, even though IOC has been flagging and is in dire need of decent support and development, I have most of my miners gathering that coin. Worth a gamble