My experience is similar to, but different from, norwoody's.
I spent $4500 to record in a studio for 3 days. I shopped the engineer here on the forums, found a guy who seemed to be up to interesting stuff and who I had a rapport with. And who is apparently a very capable professional engineer.
But that was AFTER I'd had a project studio for some years, and made a whole lot of mistakes and finally figured out what I was after. So, I knew exactly what I wanted- a better room than I have here at home and somebody else to tape op, and someone to do the engineering so I could focus on performance. And the chance to try out a more expensive tape machine than my own.
We rehearsed and recorded the rehearsals very intensively in the weeks before entering the studio, as well as doing a few live performances.
We spent an entire day trying to get a good sound in the way overtreated, concrete, Bill Putnam designed room from hell, and I ended up having to place the mics myself. Then we recorded 65 takes in 2 days.
I was sure the sound quality was going to be way better than my home/project studio efforts, so we re-recorded a bunch of stuff we had already recorded at home, and some new stuff.
Turns out, the stuff we did at home sounds a lot better to me. Better room, is a lot of why! Better performances too- not surprising, that studio was not a performance space as much as it was an assembly/manipulation space.
But we did get 4 tracks that will be on our album. The sound is a real compromise, but those are our best performances of those tunes. Everything else we tried, we did better at home, recording and performance, both.
But the main difference between my experience and norwoody's- I don't think I can record other people's acts, regardless of style and approach, well. If their approach is very purist acoustic in the room like mine, I think I could do very well. There are artists who I definitely could record, here at home, better than any of their big budget big studio records have been done. But for a whole lot of approaches to recording and especially assembly-oriented and processing-oriented stuff, forget it. I can't do it.
I can do my specific thing as well or better than anyone out there- but I could never pretend to be able to record anyone who walked in the door and do it well.