You both are absolutely right!!
We should probably ask...... a question then.
How fast do you want your feet to hit the ground running and what income do you want to make from day one?
There's two ways to do this if you are just starting.
Fast Way
1. You have a bankroll to buy established domains with traffic that make "X" amount of Parking PPC income daily to make you happy.
Slower Way
2. It takes a long while before a hand reg'd name gains enough traction parking (Parked.com, Sedo, RevenueDirect) to generate suitable income for anyone. Thus you need to develop sites and build the traffic to them.
If you are new to this you should stay away from hand registering vanity names. Stick to generic keyword phrase of 2 - 3 words as little characters as possible.
Also at the end of the day the mini script sites that most of us use to develop our domains is still consider parking. You just get to keep 100% of revenue instead of giving 40% - 60% to a parking company.
I think the majority of the people on this board do a little of
#1 and
#2.