I don't really have a reference point for what knitting equipment costs, but allowing that every hobby has a range of quality and prices, soldering seems like a case where it's dicey to have bad equipment when learning the ropes, given that the downsides includes destroying the thing you're trying to solder. It isn't a forgiving thing to do badly!When I originally researched it, the impression I got was that if you had zero experience and were practicing entirely at home, it was unwise to to try to learn with cheap tools, and the expensive ones might cost more than the things I want to solder. If that impression is wrong, it's a reflection of the inaccessibility of the hobby to newcomers!
That said, okay, hobbies are just kind of like that. Knitting is a good analogy in the sense that there's, like, a tacit social contract that it's is either a hobby or a job, and you will never find yourself in a situation where you need to knit unexpectedly -- contrast with sewing which everyone needs a little of from time to time, but it's low-stakes if you screw up and you can muddle through the urgent parts with a garbage sewing kit you bought in a convenience store. I'd be even unhappier if people changed how they designed appliances such that routine maintenance required me to knit!
a dyspraxic seven-year-old can do it. do you have better hand-eye coordination than a dyspraxic seven-year-old?
I mean I have no doubt that I can do it (though I will not presume to judge what percentile of seven-year-olds I beat), but I doubt I could do it well on a blind first try. Again in the relatively short bit of research I did, I found plenty of failure stories from adults, some of which were expensive! It sounded though like the complexity was less in putting things in the right place and more in the mechanics and chemistry of the process and the behaviour of the ingredients.
None of this is really that bad in an objective sense -- I've done lots of things more difficult and expensive -- but it's that tacit social contract thing. Society tricked me into thinking I would't need to solder unless I wanted to go into EE, then changed the rules! If I learn to solder under these conditions, I'm letting the terrorists win.
I do suspect we might just have different feelings about what counts as a bigger hassle, though. In my mind, there's a huge gulf between reversible mechanical operations and destructive or chemical ones -- as long as it's there's not much risk of screwing it up, it bothers me much less to spend half an hour disassembling something than it does to reapply adhesive, which means that replacing a laptop's actual battery feels mild, but replacing the CMOS battery feels like a big deal. Soldering is on a whole other level from all that, though I will concede that something like earbuds with tiny embedded batteries fully cocooned in glue are probably even worse. I have many devices where the battery requires soldering and that's the only part that isn't trivial, though, and I've rarely had issues with connectors (though some of the very tightly-fitting ones can be scary to change). These tend to be somewhat old devices (since they're now unusable due to battery death), but the devices even older than that are often better off, because they came from an era where "obviously customers need to be able to change the battery" was still the prevailing norm!
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