I hear you.  I just picked up a couple key golden age books I’ve been after for a few years and had to basically accept to pay almost double what they’d go for just 5 years ago.  I think these will be my last big books for a long time.  Low grade bronze is fun like you say, but even those prices can be too high as well.  

Good luck with the games, get em while you can because those are going up and up and up like crazy sometimes way worse than comics in my opinion.  Like some late snes games..  More and more games are showing up at comic cons dealers booths.   Here’s a pic from a comic dealer who recently started doing games!

 Buy what you like. If comics don't thrill you, sell them and use some of the money on what you like. I haven't been buying many books lately, but have been hunting down some great 1/72 scale armored vehicles from about ten year ago. Most of the companies went out of business as the products were.too expensive for toy stores but have taken on a second life on the secondary market They are hard enough to find to make the hunt fun, but still cheap. Most sell for under $25.

This week I've sold three books on MCS for a $135 profit and spent $15 on a post Dunkirk British tank. The English Army left almost all their armor on the beaches of Dunkirk, and anticipating an imminent invasion, they created all sorts of haphazardly produced armored vehicles,  Few saw actual combat as Uncle Sam leased England a couple thousand of their top of the line tanks, and Hitler turned from the West to the East.

the mere fact of collecting can be fun and addictive , you just have to readjust your mindset...

you can still buy an old beautiful looking Peace dollar for $20 and when you tire of it you can easily sell it back for $16 not a bad mark-up for a hobby ..

i even went so far at one time that i was collecting one dollar bills !! i had a couple thousand of them and i would flatten them out and stack them ect .. i even thought about buying a bill counter from eBay (they only cost around $75 ) so i could run my bills through them... it was really fun collecting them believe it or not and then when i grew tired of it after a couple years i turned them into the bank  

if you want rare there are still many GA comics that are rare and cheap  especially in grade, it's just that nobody wants them (Peter Panda and other funny animal comics for example)

Man I have been looking for a graded copy of chrono trigger for a bit. Those are freaking sweet. I started collecting vintage Star Wars and find it as expensive as comics so I hear you on the rising cost.

Sometimes it can be a determined bidder on auction web sites that will run items up. A recent example was on some high grade CGC graded Twilight Zone comics. I bid on 12 issues and was number 2 bidder on 11 of them. I only won issue 2 which was an 8.5 for 51 dollars. It was the lowest graded copy. Most were 9.6 and 9.8's.  I bid in the upper $400's on a number of 9.8's and still lost. This person was willing to spend more than I was. Could have gone higher but that same money on silver age Marvels would benefit my collection a lot more.

Speaking of silver age Marvels I found two titles that were a bargain compared to other Marvels and were buying those for a few years but now the jig is up and I have moved on to other bargains. If you search you can still find good books for decent money.