I’m was in your situation less than two years ago in the worst of the ammo/gun/reloading shortage mess. Here is what I have/did, and I am 100% happy with the route I took. I only reload pistol at this point, but planning to cut my teeth on .223 & 30-30 soon.
Reloading bench: Home Depot Husky adjustable work table:
https://www.homedepot.com/p/Husky-6...orkbench-Table-in-Black-HOLT62XDB12/301810799
Super sturdy, easy to roll, adjustable height. They come in several sizes.
Press: Dillon 550C. I buy all my Dillon brand stuff that I can from
Scheels.com. Best prices and free shipping.
The biggest issue with Dillon is the cost. In addition to dies, you need a caliber conversion kit ($70) for each caliber die set. And it makes sense if you swap a lot to get a powder die and tool head for each caliber which runs you another $20 and $40 total, but not totally necessary. The advantage to the extra powder die and tool head is that you can keep everything set up and change calibers quickly. I am not there quite yet. I have a couple extra tool heads but not powder dies.
I have a small single stage Lee press I picked up for basically nothing and a Lee universal depriming die and that’s how I deprime the majority of all cases because when I load ammo, I start the progressive process with clean deprimed cases.
I get a lot of range brass from friends who don’t reload, so I tend to spend a lot of time on case prep due to volume as I build up my brass stores. Sometimes, I just commit a Saturday to knocking it out, or I chop it up into after work segments. My process is a preliminary soak and wash in a Home Depot bucket with hot water and Dawn. Then I sort and dry. Then I deprime by caliber and store my brass ready to load by caliber.
When ready to load, That is when I’m on the Dillon. I grab the brass and run them through the size-prime-charge-seat-crimp-done process. With a full primer tube, dies set, and cases and bullets at the press, I can load 100 9MM/.45/.38 in about 12-15 minutes, and that includes visually inspecting powder and manually indexing the turntable.
When buying new, I generally buy upper quality Lee dies. I also have RCBS and Hornady dies I bought used. I only use carbide pistol dies.
I use an old Redding beam scale to check my charges. I had a Hornady pocket digital scale that was horribly off, so I sent it back. When I start loading precision rifle, I’ll probably look at adding a good RCBS digital at some point.
I have a Frankford Arsenal depriming tool I used to use for depriming. It works okay, but prefer the Lee setup.
I have a lot of $ in my set up, maybe too much if you ask my wife, but I’m pretty sure she could liquidate the entire set up for 90% of what I paid, based on private sales I’ve seen lately.
Good luck with your new hobby!