I've been brewing for 28 years...ever since a great fellow at the North Carolina State Fairgrounds convinced me that I could make 2-3 cases of beer for the princely price of $14. Keep in mind that was back in the days when homebrewing had just been legalized again. Anyhow, after a couple attempts I was on my way and indeed I could squeeze out a few bags of extract and have a very drinkable beer. Of course, over the years the prices doubled, and to boot, my brewing skills improved drastically.
One day, I decided that I could make a quantum leap and improve the good beer I had been making and start brewing beer that was of the quality that the micros and the regionals make. So, after researching extensively on Homebrewer's Digest and on the first true websites devoted to the craft, I piled up a list of equipment and started brewing AG.
It immediately gave me an artisan's freedom I never had with extract or mixed batches. Of course, my first attempts were clumsy, but at least I had a solid idea of how things should look from my extensive background brewing partial grains/extract batches. The first couple of beers came out better than what I had been brewing, and after a period of improving equipment and procedure, I quickly got to the point where I am very happy with my own output.
To do that, I ended up with a stripped-down 3 burner Sabco burner setup with my old modified Sankey kegs for HLT and Boiler. I built myself a Gott cooler setup because it's easier to maintain temps in it rather than in the Sankeys (used to use a 15g. Sankey for mashing.) I built a 50-foot immersion cooler one day because I got tired of the old 3/8" job that had been with me from the extract days. I bought a mill. I got a refractometer. I got a precision digital thermo. All this stuff one step at a time as I could afford it, never too much so that SWMBO got ticked off when the Visa bill rolled in.
In other words, move into it slowly is my free advice. Know how to brew a decent beer from extracts and have a good fermentation and finishing (bottling/kegging) set up first. If you want to do AG, research how the experts and how the common guy does it -- do both. Start relatively simple. Learn what works, what doesn't, what makes things easier and what's a waste of your hard-earned money. DO NOT try to build one of those wet-dream automated breweries before you learn how to do each step - milling, mashing, vorlauf, sparge, boil, chill, etc. You will end up with too many unknowns and you will spend too long trying to put it all together.
One day, if you are like me, you will have a computer-controlled fully automated 1 bbl. brewing setup where you simply input your recipe paramters to the computer. But if you try that before you do it the hard way, I think you will be sorry.
Your mileage may vary, of course.