Saw this before, and thought, "ooh, so much to say about this", but was too busy to do it justice.
And now, at the end of a long day, after a few well-earned drinks, I now I have the time, but possibly not the sobriety to address the topic. So please excuse me if I ramble. But here goes.
The most important aspect of music production is the least-discussed, I think. And that's the business of how you get from the idea to the finished thing. And when you get down to it, that's got
nothing to do with technique, or how you set a compressor, or what plugins you use.
Don't get me wrong; you need good gear, and you need good skills. That's a given. But good gear and good skills are only
necessary conditions for making good stuff. They're nowhere near
sufficient conditions.
I think Mettelus might be doing his friend an unintentional disservice in his OP here, in this specific way: I don't reckon it's the limited gear that's stopped him tinkering and procrastinating. He sounds like a guy who just doesn't tinker and procrastinate, to me.
Now, for those of us who are easily distracted, and I am certainly one, modern DAWs offer endless opportunities for not getting things done. But opportunity is not cause, and we're all in charge of our own working practices.
And finally, I come to my point, which is this: how much thought do you give to your
working practices? I don't mean how you work an EQ or position a mic. That's skill, not process.
Process is more like this stuff: How do you get started? How do you know when you've finished? Have you even come up with a working definition of finished? And so on.
I reckon the guy with the basic gear could answer those questions. And I bet his answers wouldn't be especially gear-based.