Reproducibility requires more than just measuring ingredients, however, as other characteristics can greatly change results. Leaven viability, flour moisture content, relative humidity, ambient temperature, and accidents of a home-baker's process (did you get interrupted by a child / work / partner / household exigency during your dough prep or bake) all have pretty sharp impacts on results.

Precise reproducibility requires not just monitoring ingredients, but overall environment, dough response, and more.

Or ... you can roll with it as an amateur (both in the "nonprofessional" and "for the love of it" senses), recognise that every bake is its own experiment, measure what you can, but allow for variation. I've been baking bread for about six years now. Results vary, many look great, and all but a very few taste amazing, even where I go far out of nominal parameters.

Biggest goof to date was omitting salt from a batch. (Salting the finished product ... recovered mostly.) Otherwise I've survived odd assortments of flours, accelerated or extended prooving cycles, high- or low-temperature ovens, different cookware, and more. Bread is just really freaking resilient stuff, and so long as you're not planning on hitting the same spot every time, have fun with it, and learn, in the spirit of TFA.

The whole obsession about measuring giving exact hydration percentages is strange to me.

Assume you have 100g of flour at equilibrium 20% ambient humidity, and the same 100g of flour at 80% humidity.

I don’t know how different the effective moisture content would be, but measuring the weight of the flour to the gram seems like you’re including the moisture in the weight of the flour. Maybe one packs denser on a scoop. I don’t know. But I don’t necessarily think it’s more accurate.

On the other hand, it’s really easy to just pour in 540g of flour, mix in a shy tablespoon of salt, 280g of water, and a good glop of starter. Far easier than trying to get consistent scoops or measure to the meniscus in a liquid measured.

> You'll even get better at it till you usually get something good.

This is the crux.

Sure, if I bake a loaf of odd bread every couple of days, I will EVENTUALLY get good enough to produce something good rather than just edible. After how long? A week? A month? A YEAR?

So, in the interim, I am WASTING those ingredients and my time.

I liken this to knife sharpening. Sure, EVENTUALLY you will get the feel for sharpening on whetstones and then sharpening your kitchen knives is quick and straightforward. But how many times will it take--especially if you have no mentor to teach you? Alternatively, you can get a fixed-angle sharpener and have sharp kitchen knives tonight.

I worked at a culinary school for a while. In the bread kitchen they taught you the formula stuff, but also, to recognize what the dough would feel like, look like, even taste like, when it was right. They taught you how to adapt if the flour was a little drier today than yesterday, if the kitchen was a little more humid.