O... kay, then.
I just remember an offer or two in another campaign to have my marginally more expensive gear made instead of bought at the start of the game and went from there.
Yes. I tend to do that in campaigns on here when I have the skill points/modifiers anyway, because of two reasons:
1) It can, given some co-operation, mean the difference between having starting gear that is emotionally significant to the character for backstory reasons and they will go on to get it improved and enchanted and use it over their career and it's a link to past and etc, OR having non-masterwork gear that has to be replaced as soon as you have the money because non-masterwork stuff can't be enchanted, improving stuff to masterwork is RAW impossible, and going without magic gear in D&D is literally character suicide (as in, you[r character (edit: BLACKLEAF, NOOO!!!)]
will die, because the increases in difficulty in the game as you level assume you have it). Mechanically, this largely makes no difference, indeed you might be better off with the second option since it lets you take some of the fancier expensive modifications that need to be built into the armour from the start, but it enables a lot more roleplaying (such as heirlooms, mementos of friends and family, etc).
2) One of my attached conditions is always working out some reason why the two characters would have encountered each other, why one would give the other discounts on their services, why they are still together... all the sort of stuff that an adventuring party should really have, but on here rarely does unless the DM mandates it because people don't communicate (Teal and I co-ordinating our backstory over IRC aside).
And then people like RPGeek start crying about it being metagaming and blah blah blah, despite in the same threads people, including him, choosing character archetypes (or getting others to choose them) to better match up with the party mechanically.
Honestly, most of the people on here trying to play D&D make me sad, because I can only conclude most of you have never gamed much outside here, and you keep picking up the worst habits from each other.