[bowsamic]

Frankly I think the real problem is that most home cooks or even pro recipe writers are actually pretty clueless about these things. They don't have any formal education and they just fluked into something that works for them but they don't know why. So you end up with a majority of recipes online being overly specific in places that don't matter and really unspecific in those that do. Then you follow these recipes and some work and some don't and you develop your own intuition, which is very specific to your own setup and your ingredients.

I have been watching Gordon Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares, the UK one, which is not very dramatic like the US one, and instead actually really focussed on the restaurant and the kitchen. One thing that amazes me is the clear, laser focussed simplicity of the dishes that he suggests. He and the other chefs (at least those ones who have been to catering school) simply have an education that allows them to cook a basic pasta dish that will blow away any intricate home cooking recipe. Not only are home cooking recipes generally worse in outcome, they are actually more complicated, more difficult, and more expensive to make. Uneducated cooks don't seem to trust the basic flavours and textures of what they are cooking.