I'm a newbie who started out with 2 stops from Tony that just arrived yesterday. He recommended a "second quality " hanging strop for me since newbies typically butcher up their strops while climbing the learning curve. This was a very modest purchase in the $14 or $15 range. Seems like this would be one reasonable recommendation for you experts to consider. He also offers a free "less than second quality " hanging strop for learning purposes if a newbie buys one of his premium products.

The second strop was a 4-sided pasted model with 3u, 1u, .5, and .25u diamond pastes. The idea here was to purchase one or more (quickly turning into more) shave ready razors and postpone the learning curve on the hones for quite awhile.