Is it an excuse?
No, it's counterproductive perfectionism
I'm sitting here watching live performances on KEXP and seeing how they're using SM-58s and Sennheiser HD-280 PROs for vocals and monitoring respectively and I'm thinking...
I have a £580 Neumann TLM 102 microphone on my shopping list that I've been saving up for to record my vocals, because that's a "studio mic"
These performances sound perfectly fine and my vocals wouldn't exactly suck if I recorded them with my SM-58. And yet, I'm stalling, waiting until I can make it all "perfect". What a disease. It's not even like I'm putting that mic in a professional studio or through anything more than a Focusrite 4i4 in a tiny room I'll treat to the best of my amateur knowledge. And it's not like the mic itself is some unique fancy high-end thing or like mics can magically make your voice better (sometimes even a high-end one will literally be a bad fit for your particular voice)
I wish I could be one of those people who just do things and hope for the best. For once I wish I could just rip off the band-aid.
My perfectionism helped me excel academically but also almost miss deadlines. Now that I have no deadlines, I'm free to waste entire years of my life, and it is fucking terrifying.
I've changed the cups on those HD-280s twice since I started this album and I still haven't gotten around to recording the damn thing. My days are spent in limbo, doing all sorts of other things, from paid work to purely wasting time. Awful.
Yes. Gear is never the solution.
Stop whinging and do what you know you've got to do. It'll sound good. If there are problems you can always re-record some parts.
I worked in broadcast television for a decade and did audio for several years. We always used the SM58 for vocals when we had music performances. It’s pretty hard to improve on it.
The "performance" is the single most important factor in making a good song/recording. It's hard to improve that with gear, engineering and mixing.
You could consider renting that mic for a day or so to see if it does what you want. Compare vocal takes between mics etc. There's a library near me that just got some SM7b's for onsite podcasting - keen to give them a try. Tho might be weird to sing in a library 😅