It was pretty easy to do without buying the box if you had a network card you could put into monitor mode. Fun thing was that you only needed one handshake initially, then you could replay it and collect the responses which were each initialized differently.

I've tried the WPA equivalent attack (capture handshake, crack offline...) against targets with physical security that extended beyond their wifi. It was a bit arduous and fiddly and expensive and risky. If I could've compromised a neighbor and gotten the handshakes without traveling for them I'd definitely have preferred that option.