I've pretty much given up with kits, and also become more frustrated with the taste from my extract brews. I'm wondering if something happens to some of the molecules in the malt extract during the freeze drying or concentrating process now (possibly something known as a Maillard reaction to the biochemists - it's a well known phenomenon in wine kits) - leaving them as unfermentables in the wort and giving that distinctive but subtle homebrew 'tang'. Although my latest Fullers ESB extract clone is OK, after ten weeks in the bottle, the carbonation and colour are both fine, but it lacks the top-end marmalade hoppiness, punch, and sweetness of the real thing, and it has that slight 'tang'. It's at best, an approximation. I used the Fullers yeast too.
For those (like me) who would like to go all-grain, but don't have the space (or the justification for spending money on all the kit either), there are two other possibilities to explore.
1) BIAB (brew in a bag) where you put your grains in a large muslin bag and mash them in your boiling vessel, before hoisting the bag out, letting the wort run-off into the vessel, and boiling that up as per usual with hop additions at various times. But there's no sparge (rinsing the mash) involved which means low-efficiency and you'll need a very large pot and hoist for lifting out car-engines or similar.
2) Partial Mash. You place your grains in a large picnic drinks cooler (about £25 from Argos), mash (steep the grains) for an hour (the cooler keeps the temperature constant) and then either tip the resulting wort into the boil vessel and proceed once again as normal but with a smaller volume*, or adding more water and a lot less dried malt extract (DME) than you would have for a straightforward extract brew for a full-volume boil. Again - low efficiency because you're not carrying out a sparge.
Even better is to bodge a tap into the side of the cooler (with a filter if you're posh), so you can run the wort off after mash, and also sparge the grains - meaning you extract more from the grains - resulting in a higher efficiency. This is pretty much the start of an all-grain boil, as you should end up with the full amount of wort to boil up if you've done your sums right. But for all grain, you'll need a mahoosive (30+l) pot to put on the stove, so it's preferable to do get something rigged up outside or in the garage if you have one.
*you can stop at this stage if you want to do smaller brews (@woofage)