I take it the poll is supposed to indicate high/medium/low degrees of band preparedness before gigging?
I was already 38 before I took up bass, so I guess it was inevitable that at least some of the people I found to play with would be more experienced than me in the beginning. I first started jamming with some other guys around the same age and up, and we were awful, even though there was some good individual ability there. We only played a few songs at an open mic once and there's video to document how bad we could be.
But by then I had gotten the bug of an idea that I possibly COULD manage to play a real gig. That jam group broke up and there were a couple of abortive CL projects, basically each one taught me some mistakes to avoid. Eventually (still through CL) I got in with a group we wound up calling "Switchblade Beat." The guitarist was experienced, but largely in metal bands while this was more rock/pop oriented; the singer was an excellent singer but didn't have gigging-band experience, the drummer was the guitarist's son and not experienced. We had our first gig playing an opening set, because a friend of the guitarist's had a band with a new member who didn't know their full set yet, so we filled out the night. In retrospect I think we were pretty rough, but apparently we did well enough to get booked in there in our own right.
That group played maybe a dozen gigs over a year and a half, I wound up quitting due to the guitarist's alcoholism and, as it happened, moved about an hour away about the same time. That was 2013. It was back to CL and some other projects, some that were abortive and some that got out and gigged a bit, but now I was generally playing with more experienced musicians and each group was a little tighter and hotter than the next. I had another year-and-a-half run with a classic/southern rock-focused cover band, that played a lot of cheap dives for $300 total, but played a LOT. That was about 2014-5, and was when I really started thinking of myself as a gigging musician who could EXPECT to get out there and put on a show.
After that were a couple of projects that I took more initiative to launch; Longhand was essentially a revival of Switchblade Beat with a different (non-alcoholic) guitarist, but it wound up making me realize that I had grown beyond that first group. Six Cowards, in some ways, was my favorite project, covering modern alt/indie stuff with really good people. But it never got traction with bars or crowds and wound up with a revolving door of drummers, so I shut it down after a couple of years (by now we're up to 2017 or 18). One of the drummers who subbed with us has later said that he thinks we were ahead of the curve and would have been more successful five years later.
(I also started wearing my hair short again).
I won't keep dragging this out; basically, while Six Cowards was winding down, I was getting involved with a circle of musicians that called ourselves the Granite State Rhythm Section. Weirdly, that group never really got out gigging as a band in its own right other than once or twice, but the circle has spun out into various other, busier projects. Some of those guys now have a group I'm not in, called the Dancing Yetis, but I play with them as the backing band for Blues Brothers: the Next Generation, and my bread-and-butter classic-rock bar band, Mugshot Monday, started with three of us who were GSR alums.
OK, so you just wanted a poll, and there's my whole history in bands for the last 16 years. I guess the point is that I didn't start out with a group that was all practiced and polished at the start, but we weren't all clueless either. Over the years there's been a certain feel that I've been climbing up the food chain. I'm not in the top/best/busiest working bands in my market, and likely never will be. But there's definitely been an upward curve from the starting point. It's a matter of keep learning, keep practicing, keep hustling, and pay attention to what dynamics make a band work.
