Well I bought one, so now I have a MSO2072A and MSO4014 coming, I think I have a 30 day return period so perhaps I'll play with both. I totally just blew my budget for an AWG... but I think for this it might be worth it.
I've been playing with an Analog Discovery and it's been really helpful in highlighting why I need four channels. Especially while you're still learning, it's really important to get a full view of everything that is happening inside a circuit, because changing the value of a component can completely change the functioning of a circuit. I've only had the Analog Discovery for about two weeks, and I've already gotten frustrated on like 20 occasions with the fact that it only has 2 channels. And that's just playing around with a simple homemade buck converter circuit. 1 channel for the square wave input, 1 channel on the coil, 1 channel on the capacitor, 1 channel on the diode, and 1 channel on the output... err wait, that's five channels... see my point?
The other thing the Analog Discovery has taught me is that dealing with a general purpose desktop computer user interface is really quite cumbersome, I'm really glad I followed everyones advise and did not get a high end USB scope. The lag of the USB interface is also very frustrating, you change a setting on the screen and takes like 100+ milliseconds for your instrument to catch up, all the while you're not seeing any output on the screen. It also has very slow wfms/s.
The last thing the Analog Discovery has taught me is that I don't 'trust' its readings. When you're a beginner, and have no teacher, you have little clue about what you should be seeing in your circuit traces, so you really have to put a lot of faith and trust that the readings your instrument is giving you is correct. Things like aliasing and bad software math calculations can totally screw up your measurements. On my Analog Discovery I'm seeing all these weird reading that I don't think should be there, but they are there, and I have no clue if they should or shouldn't be there. I have no 'faith' in the instrument, and knowing what I know now I don't think I could have faith in the DS1054Z ether.