[Hehe]

The perfect way to describe coffee and its gears for me is analog cameras.

Coffee beans are films.
Coffee machines are cameras
Grinders is the chemicals you use to develop photos.
Everything about coffee making involves the understanding of the equivalent of shutter speed, aperture and sensitivity/ISO: temperature and pressure that dictates the flow rate.

Coffee beans that one uses would have the most impact on coffee. Most of people, like hobz's dad had coffee pretty much one way. They want a dark roast with a prominent bitterness infused in the coffee flavor that they can adjust using some kind of sweetners be it milk, sugar or whatever.

But there's so much more to that flavor in coffee. You can have different beans (caturra, geisha, yirgacheffe... etc) in different roast level as well as processing (washed/wet vs natural/dry or even fermentation) and just like film, it'd give you a totally different tonality (flavor) in your picture.

Coffee equipment, regardless whether it's an espresso machine (cheap or expensive), pour over, or whatever is about how to take a shot effectively. My Kees Spiritello/Slayer single group does the same job as the Breville 870 I had before. The difference is speed and consistency. I can steam my milk to the desire temperature within 10sec while having zero variation in water temperature and pressure (flow rate) vs the 870.

It doesn't mean the 870 can't make decent coffee. It just means my Kees can do it way faster and repeat that same flavor for 10 shots without breaking a sweat while the 870 might struggle to get it right from one shot to another. Just like either a Nikon F6 would do the same job as a Nikon FE. Given the same film and lens, and the same develop method, they can totally take the exact same shot. The F6 just does it faster and more consistent than the FE by miles.