Agreed. I would just like to add on to your comment. I would prefer to hire someone with experience and the correct skill sets than someone with just a degree. Having a degree doesn't mean knowing the subject, I find it more often than not, they just memorize, regurgitate with no understanding of the fundamentals. When I was doing a lot of hiring all over the world as group CTO for a multinational. I would never hire a mid-senior sys admin who couldn't tell me the fundamental low level differences between a POSIX based OS and say Windows coherent or someone to a graphics artist post who did not know at least 1 form of the traditional arts like drawing or photography

Don't have any experience with the CRS-1 but Juniper M series routers have outperformed Cisco GSR consistently from my experience.

You'd get at least 1 PSU along with the chassis. My experience is cisco supervisor throughput start dropping massively the moment you start having any rate-limit configs on it. Anyways you won't be having any supervisor blades with that price, and I have never encountered any "crippled" functionality in hardware from Cisco products, although the varying versions of IOS do seem to "cripple" certain functionality but I don't recall Cisco ever trying to cripple their hardware to make different versions, they just make you buy a bigger box instead.