I think we are more alike than you might think. I keep a spreadsheet all year round of the stuff I want, do a lot of research, save my money, and wait for sales. Right now I have money set aside for Cinematic Studio Woodwinds. Like you, I'm filling out my collection.Yes, that's exactly what I mean by dangerous. At the end of my post I mentioned that impulse purchases are fine for people who are independently wealthy, but most musicians are probably closer to the poor end of the scale than the fabulously wealthy part of the scale.
I'll lay out the two extremes as I seem them:
Scenario One: The consumer picks out a finite number of libraries, and only purchases them. The biggest developers will get bigger and most new developers fail.
Scenario Two: The consumer purchases every great deal that they find just because it's a great deal. They go broke.
The middle path between these two, I believe, is making a list. Do your research as new libraries come out during the year, find developers that you like, and keep an eye out for good deals from them.
I guess what I'm realizing from your post is that there are two actions:
Action One: discovering and researching libraries throughout the year, finding what works for you in a cool state, when you can be as rational as possible.
Action Two: finding good deals on software.
The key is to keep these separate. You don't want to be researching new software while it's on sale, because of course you're going to convince yourself that you want it, need it, and are definitely going to use it.
Another thought: for every new library, every new plugin, you have to learn the terminology of the knobs, the layout of GUI, the actual sound of it, the playability of it, etc. It's a giant time-suck, and if our objective is to be getting music out, then we're better off spending 100 hours on 1 library and getting to know it intimately, rather than spending 1 hour on each of 100 libraries.
And yeah, I definitely checked out your list near-daily, and I am genuinely thankful that you made it. Thank you! I actually did make some purchases that I was not planning on making because I found them on your list. But they were parts of collections that I already had, not random departures from my norm. It may seem hypocritical of me, but I do allow myself impulse purchases, especially around Black Friday, but I save up a few hundred just for the occasion. I said this in a previous post, but my list is not dogmatic, it's just a guidepost.
But I'm sure I do more impulse purchases than you do.