Bought a house in 2013. The reason I wanted the house? It had a dedicated home theater/media room. I really couldn't have cared less about the rest of the house. Don't get me wrong it's a nice house, but that was the major selling point for me because I'd always wanted a real home theater.
After nearly 3 years of using the HT room as a storage, spare bedroom (despite the fact the house has 4 bedrooms with a spare already), and kids hang out area, I finally decided that it was time to start using it for its intended purpose.
I did very minimal research into HT equipment. One of the local big box retailers here in Canada (Visions) was having a sale along with a "do not pay for 36 months OAC" deal. So I headed over there.
I was looking at the Klipsch and Polk speakers that they had. The sales guy demoed another brand, and in store they sounded great. They were "endorsed" by a well know Canadian sound engineer named Ian Paisley. On top of that, he cut me a really good deal on on entire 5.1 package, with an Epson 8350 projector and a Yamaha RX-A2040 receiver.
Anyway, when my subwoofer blew up around Christmas time last year, I started researching into a new subwoofer. I wasn't unhappy per se with my system, but found out it definitely wasn't nearly as high end as I'd been led to believe. I did use it for years, and we got a lot of enjoyment out of it TBH. But I feel like I was taken advantage of, and wasted ~2K. C'est la vie.