On the other hand, you could start off with something even if it's "crap" and work on your editing and composition skills. Look around on YouTube, it's filled with gazillions of videos, many of them poorly recorded and crappy, but some of them are quite creative. As long as the video has good production values, I never sit there thinking, "my, what a crappy camcorder he used to film that."
If you can buy a used miniDV camcorder, I suspect you'll find those are more robust and easier to use than flash-based cameras, despite what may initially seem like a hassle of dealing with tape. The miniDV editing workflow is mature and ubiquitous -- all you need is a Firewire cable and any computer made in the last 10 years should be able to do the job. AVCHD, however, is a learning curve and requires some hefty processing power, especially if you're on a Mac which is going to transcode the format to Apple Intermediate Codec before editing. You'll also require a crapton of disk space.
I recently picked up a Canon HF100 on clearance for $400. Full HD, 1080p recording, very nice little camera, but I'm going through the learning curve of how to edit the video on a Mac. If I was buying a cheap flash-based camera for casual use, I'd look at the Canon FS200.
