I am RioRico, and I am a lens addict. My sig used to list a few lenses. Not all of my lenses (last count: 150), just a couple dozen. But I have been pondering some treatments for LBA, and some cures, and their likelihood of success.
CURES: Death, coma, total paralysis (probably); blindness (possibly); penury (surmountable).
TREATMENTS: Electroshock (probably); hypnosis, conditioning (possibly); abandonment (nope).
Yes, it's pretty grim. But there
is a way to ameliorate and live with LBA. It's called DIY. Do not purchase finished lenses; grind them yourself, or assemble them from scratch. In a thread on another site, this was posted, in a discussion of using enlarger lenses on bellows for general photography:
All enlarger lenses have aperture rings. But other kinds of lenses can be fitted to an M42 bellows, as long as you have an M42 ring in which to mount them. You can use cheap M39-M42 adapters from China or Ukraine, usually a buck or two each. Edmund Scientific and other optics suppliers sell all sorts of simple or complex lenses, cheap. Just bare crafted glass, nothing else, meant for homebrewing, experimenting. You can cannibalize old round (or not-so-round) eyeglasses, and elements from LF lenses, and many other lenticular chunks of (somewhat) clear glass or plastic, just to try out, to see what happens.
To get any sharpness with such glass, you need to make your own aperture discs. Some old and current Russian fisheyes, and Lensbabies, use such discs, which can be as simple as thin black plastic blanks with a hole (circular is good but not mandatory) cut in the center. Check online and you'll find formulae for f-stop per focal length and hole size. Mount the disc behind the lens in the bellows or tube and have at it.
These non-enlarger lenses will NOT provide Fine-Art Photography results. Even with a lens hood, you'll get odd distortion and light effects, rather Lomo-like. With some, especially with wide glass, large aperture, and a focus ring, you can achieve f/0.5 or so, faster than a speeding bullet, softer than a rotten tomato. Shrink the aperture a little, you can get an 1855 feel.
Too much modern photography is based on marketing and gear-obsession. Try DIY homebrewing. A bellows is a great test-bed to try out weird sh*t: A frontdoor fisheye security lens! Bubbled glass! Kaleidoscopes! Grandpa's spectacles! Fresnel lenses! Thrift-shop binoculars, telescopes, toys, old folder cams! Anything you can tear apart with bent glass in it! It's all grist for experimentation.