Dear Mary,
Yes, I do think paint brands matter; however the hues you pick as well as the overall composition of hues on your palette will also have enormous effects on your results.
First, with respect to brands: you should expect to pay more for better paint. I feel we should all buy the best quality that is in budget...student quality paints often have "fillers" which can mean you need to use more paint to try to get rich saturated hues; not only will you go thru the tube faster, your results will be disappointing. Winsor Newton and Grumbacher are excellent quality paints, and you should feel comfortable with them (not the student grade, however). Living in a small town, you will be thrilled to enter the catalog (and cost-saving) world of art supply shopping; send for catalogs from all the major suppliers...you will find them in ads of magazines like Artists and American Artists' magazine. (If you would like, just call or email me for phone numbers or web addresses.) Utrecht puts out its own brand of oils
www.utrechtart.com, which are reasonably priced. I have been happy with the quality as well. I think it is better to shop for prices among different catalog (or other) suppliers, than to shop for prices among different hues.
Second, the actual hues, even though they may have the same names, can be vastly different among manufacturers. Artist Stephen Quiller has published a wheel and detailed chart that will give you some basis of comparison among manufacturers...look at his book "Color Choices".
With regard to actually selecting colors for your palette, you'll find that hues like the cadmiums tend to be more costly than the earth colors...beware of cadmiums that have labels like cadmium HUE or cadmium-BARIUM as these have the fillers I mention above. However, it's important to have the super saturated colors available because you can always gray them down with their complements, but you can never, for example, bring a yellow ochre up to the intensity of a cadmium yellow or lemon. Earth colors are, in my view, "convenience colors", meaning you can mix them from other more basic, stronger colors. They cost less because the expensive colors are mixed with inexpensive colors.
Then, with regard to the hues you actually place on your regular palette, you will find as many compositions as artists. If you look at the various discussion on the Forum under the topic "flesh tint in oil", you will see that every contributor has a different approach. I use a limited 6-7 color palette without earth tones, yet many painters incorporate a large inventory of hues, including earth tones.
I have seen your critique request, and would like to consider your work in more depth before offering my opinion. It may well be that making different color choices about skin tone color is what you are after, rather than manipulating the paint.
Kindest reagrds, Chris