My opinion (due to a limited hobby budget):

1. Fly the snot out of the trainer. If you cannot do rolling circles with your trainer then you have not flown it enough. People think trainers are only used to learn to fly...they can do more...

2. Then go buy anything you want.

or....

do what is probably the more common approach.....that is, fly the trainer a for a while, then move up to the next plane (like a stick), the the next...and so on.

Either way is cool.

IMHO, I think people move up waaayyyy tooooo faaassstttt....they want to fly those "cool" planes asap (forget about stick time...due diligence...).