what is the best buy-in to gain MTT experience

[FrogMouth]

In response to your original question, you should try some of the sites other than PP & PS. Prima & Pacific have much smaller fields for the respective buy-ins. You should try your had at those. Much less of a time commitment and still have a relitivly easy fields. In a field of 500 your chances go up exponentially over those 2000+ donkfests.