Skating boots are very specific gear, not to be compared to any other gear. New boots hurt and it's friggin hard to bend knee in them, when they stop hurting, this means they are good, but won't last very long. Even skaters who won't jump more than 2S but are heavier than 50-60 kilos change boots from time to time - because of forces affecting them while jumping and spinning nad make them break. When boot is broken, there is no stability in the ankle and it is dangerous to perform things more complicated than crossovers because it can cause injury.
When you replace your boots, you virtually have to learn some elements again because boot and blade feels a little bit different than the old one, so they can't use worse boots for training and better boots for competition. Yup, skating is probably the only sport there change of equipment can make you loose skills, even if equipment is the same type as old one. And this isn't the matter of skills. Katia Kurakova had a video of trying to skate in these blue plastic rentals without toe pics - at first she wasn't doing any better than I in rentals...
Also equipment fit for elite tech content is very expensive (boot + blades - you can put old baldes on new boots, it's common for amateurs, I don't know if elite skaters do it often), so skaters rarely have more than a good pair and that other pair that barely holds thanks to fan's prayers and duck tape that they have as back up. See kids in JGP with lots of tape on their boots, probably waiting for the bigger size of boots to fit or elite skaters by the beginning and end of the season. Nikita Volodin had lots of tape on his boots at Worlds or Daniel Martynov at Cranberry and TBH it looked like he had issues due to state of his boots.
My boots are with me from some time but I'm perfectly capabe of UR 1T and 1Lo off ice and I don't even try it on ice. Some amateur skaters even stop learning jumps after singles because boots suitable for harder jumps are very expensive and have to be replaced if you skate nad perform all your content - it's not like skiing gear that you pay a lot but can use even +10 years.
(thank you for reading my TEDwrite)
