myt1, Just keep on fishing with and open mind and continuously learning and over time you may well fish finer than that fellow. It takes time. I've been serious about fly fishing for over a half century now and I learn new stuff and have surprising realizations all the time. There are a few forms of angling, a single floating fly on smooth but complex current river and tropical flats are my two arenas, that emphasize pure casting. Where an inaccurate, hard landing, clumsy splash is game over and you consider every aspect of the cast and presentation before lifting your rod is where your intimate connection to a carefully tuned outfit is realized. And it is not always appropriate or necessary. In a couple of weeks we'll fly to Florida to visit an aged relative and I'll carry on a tube with two clunky 9-weights, perhaps an Albright XX and an ECHO for tossing big weighted streamer flies on heavy tippet in some canal or park lake. There would be no advantage or extra fun in bringing our most sophisticated bonefish/permit outfits for this application.
As far as a fly rod as a status symbol, this is nothing that would ever have occurred to me, like who is paying attention? Over our month long Idaho/Montana trip this season I was entrusted to fish one of only three existing examples of Sage's yet to be released Ignitor as a tester I could write about upon its July introduction (which I did). That could be construed, I imagine, as a status symbol but I spent ever day I was in the proximity of other fly fishers striving to hide/disguise what I was fishing. Actually only one astute angler in a fishing access parking lot said, "Hey what rod is that, it looks like a Sage but I've never seen that color?" I demurred and commented it was just some old prototype and declined to have him take a closer look.
