If you could redo your bitcoin experience, what would you do differently?

So I have a couple thousand dollars I'm looking to turn into bitcoin.

What avenue would you take to start. Coinbase? Another app/website? Or a hardware wallet out the get go?

If I purchase bitcoin through coinbase now, just to get in there, can I move it to my hardware wallet later? I'm thinking Trezor eventually due to it being open source, but please let me know if you have another recommendation.

For a budget of two thousand, what's the right avenue to begin?

And I apologize if this is too generic, I'll continue researching. Thanks in advance all