This sadly isn’t relegated just to photography but almost all hobbies and professions. There are a lot of insecure gate keepers who wish to keep newbies out and protect their fragile sense of falsely gained superiority. Thankfully there are also a lot of amazingly kind helpful people too if you look. But you can very be scared off unfortunately.

Sadly elitism and insecurity seems to be so rife in almost every profession and hobby. I think you see the same thing across almost the whole spectrum of human experience and it often bothers the hell out of me.

Agree with everyone else that generally speaking I’d take a versatile well built zoom over a “perfect” and extremely fast prime. Unless you are a pro who is always shooting in specific situations where you know the lighting and have specific needs the versatility of a good zoom seems to me to win all the time. Besides with modern digitals I find there’s so much extra dynamic range you can pull out of shot that even very underexposed shots that ideally need a faster lens can be brought out in editing.