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I just rambled this off while typing up a post in the guide. I don't have time to think about it right now. Nor does it belong in that post. I need a better handle of where I stand before I ask others questions.

Today is a tuesday. I'm busy preparing this week for next monday. My time then frees up... sort of. I then have that week to prepare for something at the beginning of August. And then I won't have spare time in August.
So.... this is me realizing that I won't be able to do anything until September. x -x I had thought that I'd find time this month. I didn't realize that this month was so short. Some great Gaia comeback this was. > <

ramble from post:
I guess now's the time when I need to sit back and rethink my main rule for making examples.
I want the guide to show that looking good doesn't mean that your avatar has to be expensive. I also don't want to scare away newbies who may see an expensive example and think that they'll never be able to make a good matching avatar.
An expensive avatar can look good or bad. A cheap avatar can look good or bad.
So my goal has always been to stay on the cheap side of things. However, that limits me to gold shop items since those are the only items that are guaranteed to stay at one price. A cheap RIG item might not be cheap forever. If i used an RIG item, the price of my example could raise 100k one day and the example would no longer be cheap.
However, very few people make avatars using only gold shop items. And fashionable avatars do tend to use cash shop items. There are unique aspects of styles that can only be attained using certain cash shop items. I can't reproduce those styles with only gold shop items. In other words, no matter how good a gold-shop-item-only example looks, it will always look outdated without the CS tricks.
Time to evaluate affordable/attainable/approachable/can't-think-of-the-word-I-want vs credibility.
I'll consider/ponder it another day. I believe that I'll stick to the affordable approach since the guide is aimed at those who are new to this style. And I assume that those people would be new to Gaia and have less funds.
But, what is expensive and cheap nowadays? I hear people can easily make 60k in an hour of BG. Is a high-end example of 25k being too cheap?
So, while my goal is to stay cheap... am I staying /too/ cheap? Should the bar be raised?