Not sure about the "utter crap" part, but otherwise this is the truest thing said in the thread so far.
Oh, come on! That's like saying If you want to be a better carpenter, you should only use Cobalt tools. The
ONLY proven way of getting better as a photographer (or pretty much anything else) is to work like a dog at getting better. There are
no shortcuts. A certain camera will
not make you a better photographer, whether it be a Leica or an H2D. You'll just be a bad photographer with an expensive camera.
If you have poor compositional skills, for example, how exactly is looking at the scene through a Summicron instead of a Xenon going to help you to improve? If you don't know jack about lighting, how is holding an M6 going to help? If you haven't quite got the hang of depth of field, equivalent exposures, freezing/blurring motion and don't really know how aperture and shutter speed work, is a holographic instructor going to beam out of your Super Agulon, like Princess Leia from R2D2, and deliver an impromptu lecture on the subject? I can't think of one single instance when using a Leica -- or any other brand of camera of the same type -- would help a person to be a better photographer. All in all, the original post is truely epic in the annals of blatantly fallacious reasoning.
On the other hand, all of the woes mentioned in the previous paragraph (along with innumerable others) most certainly
can be cured through hard work. Unless you are profoundly stupid, you can't shoot thousands of photos, looking hard for what went wrong, without finding a few of those things and drawing some conclusions. After seeing your own shadow cast on a few hundred subjects, for instance, most people are finally going to slowly get the idea, just maybe, that shooting with the sun directly behind them might not be the best idea they ever had. Whether they are looking at photos taken through an Elmar or a Skopar isn't really going to matter.
