I never was much into DXing or award collecting, but being on the West coast I have made a lot of trans-Pacific contacts, mostly on 10M. I once answered a ZL call on our local 2M repeater and it turned out he was MM near Hawaii, and I do take some pride in that having poured plenty of my sweat and blood into that particular repeater - and it was a high performance machine - we were (are) the site owner and at the time the only box on the hill so we could push the limits and didn't have to compromise anything beyond having to make our own power. But Bob had to have a good station on his boat too. He was touring the Pacific and over the next several weeks we worked him at many locations near the US West coast off Washington, Oregon, and California - and he was always solid and holding for long ragchews.
Just a few weeks ago I upgraded from Technician to Extra so more of HF is pretty new to me and I'm really just getting my feet wet. My interest these days is what I can do with portable (not necessarily QRP) and rapidly deployable gear. Presently I'm using my old FT747GX and various wire antennas but the RX is woefully inadequate and I really need to upgrade the transceiver. I'm considering the FT857D or something with similar features. Used and cheap of course.