I had nothing to show for the thousands I spent for rent.

So you wouldn’t get any depreciation on your new purchase assuming you only spent the $450k.

be best spent at this time with the long-term strategy in mind :)  

At the beginning, it may be difficult to get a more expensive property that will appreciate well and so your choice is go with the cheaper property and get cash flow until you can sell and upgrade, or wait for a really good deal which you may be waiting for quite a while and its possible that you will have spent so much time waiting that you could have purchased multiple cash flowing properties by the time you get a good appreciation deal that you can qualify for / refinance after the rehab. i know anyone can go out and get seller financing deals, HML, flip to build capital or whatever the case may be I am just saying sometimes those will be harder and could result in less deals overall. 

Do you think every investor made a 100%+ return on every dollar spent?

Pretty catchy IMO.....VRBOs money would be much better spent hiring better talent on the app/web development side.

Hours spent watching podcasts and communicating on BP do not count.

Its money well spent land development is high risk high reward.. depending on Jurisdiction. 

Some days I am literally baffled at how I spent an entire day doing nothing.To me, that feels pretty wealthy.

It sounds like you’ve set a strong foundation for your real estate investing journey, especially with the time you’ve spent educating yourself.