If you're interested in low-power stuff or doing remote mountaintop SOTA type stuff, KX3 and a Buddipole make a great kit. The usual Kenwood/Yaesu/Icom HT's are all pretty good for handhelds these days, mostly coming down to which modes/features you want support for to make the decision. (The low-budget chinese radio brands can be _okay_ in certain circumstances, but are largely pretty bad. Don't let them sour your experience of the hobby as a whole too much.)
If you're into digital modes there are tons of options to explore. Personally I'm pretty bearish on the "DMR" stuff as there's very little "Amateur" about it, but the DStar community is doing some fun stuff. http://js8call.com is interesting on the HF side.
If you want to get really crazy on HF, FlexRadio makes some pretty cool kit too.
There's no shortage of available gear, but it really depends on what you find fun. Best plan is to see if there are any clubs nearby that might be doing different types of events so you can experience different things like Earth-Moon-Earth, QRP, contesting, etc, and see what catches your fancy!
I think the license free stuff is a lot more interesting than licensed, so Meshtastic has potential. HAM is hard to convince anyone to try, but the T-Echo seems affordable and compact enough people might go for it.
Meshtastic looks interesting. Is this a way to create a sort of private long range communication on unlicensed frequencies?
No idea if that will be years from now or what, but full duplex is really cool, maybe we can start doing more with EPC Gen2 tags, assuming they are still relevant for DIYers by then and we don't have battery free Bluetooth instead.
I have one of the cheap SDR tv dongles, you can hear a lot of interesting stuff on those.
TinySA for spectrum analysis. Use an attenuator to see why Baofengs aren’t very good.
Arrow 144/440 Yagi antenna for talking to LEO satellites.
KrakenSDR for direction finding.
Icom 705 Radio for your primary transceiver. AH705 Tuner.
Yaesu FT5D for your handheld.
GD77 with OpenGD77 firmware.
MMDVM hotspot.
That should blow the bank and get you at 90% of anything anyone can do.