I think the kinds of people who are in a "community" is exactly the kinds of people who I would classify more as hobbyist riders. I encountered a lot of them along my travels, because I would follow random rail trails and relatively easy singletrack, then I'd meet these guys who were using a GPS and ultralight camping equipment and tires twice as fat as mine. They were amazed I could even get on the same trail they were on without any special gear in particular. No doubt, they probably traveled twice as far as I would in a day, they perhaps never got off to push up the very steep sections, and I'm sure they never had to backtrack like I did, but eh. For me I was happier to have spent around $1000 on my entire setup (including tent and sleep system) because it left enough money over that I could keep traveling for months. It's just a different way of looking at your bicycle.

With regard to the "cyclist's palsy", that was the injury that surprised me most - I was expecting to get sore legs, not hands! I found a pair of gel gloves helped a lot for cycling on terrain where I needed to keep my hands on the handlebars, but whenever I was on a flatter surface I just changed my position to lean on the bars with my elbows. Same thing when I got a bad neck crick, I just rested up for a day or two and then changed my riding position. I'm sure a better or more personally-adjusted bike would've been way more comfortable, but it wasn't impossible to ride long distances without it.

I think a lot of the specialized equipment is more about optimizing away inconveniences, which is great, but it's not really necessary outside of a race or "keeping up with the group" situation. If you want to tour solo, it's perfectly possible to just make do with whatever junk bike you have access to and adapt your route and behavior to the tools you have. I think when you start spending significant amounts of cash money on optimizing away the inconveniences, that's when you have entered a different class of cyclist. When you go to bike stores it often seems like all the cyclists are of that class, because all of the equipment for sale seems to be geared to them. But in the mechanic shops, I personally found it to be more balanced in the other direction. I guess there is a really large group of people who never go to a bike store and just buy department store bikes or reliable and easily-maintainable second-hand gear that the hobbyists have moved on from.