I'm a pretty good (acoustic) guitarist, and I swear it's because the guitar I began with probably should have been used as kindling. The action sucked, so I developed excellent finger strength. The poor tension made it really easy to choke a string, so I developed incredible accuracy. It was really "buzzy," so I learned complicated finger-style patterns just so it wouldn't sound so bad when I played.

The first time I got my hands on a real guitar, I sounded like Andres Segovia. :)

I won't say that I never tried to blame my tools after that, but I do often manage to remind myself that when things are going wrong it's probably not the fault of the knife, hammer, programming language . . .