And here I was hoping for a good repeatable solid recipe
I don't think reliably good baguette is as simple as a recipe. The recipe conveys very little of what goes into it. It takes a lot of practice to get down all the manual techniques. Just learning how to knead the bread properly is an art in and of itself, and, even if you use a mixer, you'll still need to experiment with the speed and mix time to get things dialed in. A lame can be a tricky thing to work with, and your slashing technique will show through in the final product. Pre-shaping and shaping the bread takes practice, and, unless you're really into climate control at your house, learning how to adjust ingredient quantities and rise times to account for changes in temperature and humidity is a science in and of itself. You'll have to fiddle with the bake time and temperature and steaming technique to figure out what works best in your oven.
Baguette is the pale lager of breads: Most the flavor comes from the technique, and the ingredients - four simple ingredients, very nearly the same four simple ingredients - have such delicate flavors on their own that there's not really anywhere for even the slightest mistake to hide.
Which isn't to say that you shouldn't do it. But I would say that you should do it because you sincerely love the process of baking bread, not simply because you enjoy eating the final product.
FWIW, one of my favorite books on the subject is Bread: A Baker's Book of Techniques and Recipes by Jeffrey Hamelman. The recipes are mostly meant for baking on a commercial scale, but the book also covers everything you need to know to adapt them to your home kitchen.
In addition to what you say, my advice is: Don't be afraid of it, just give it a try with realistic expectations. Start with something easy. Rolls and breadsticks are quite forgiving, if for no other reason than that they're usually gone before anybody can complain. ;-) Virtually any "failure" of bread can be redeemed by making toast, french toast, croutons, dipping in olive oil, etc. White is easier than grains, but you can work more grains in as you gain confidence.
Nice shapely loaves that I can make into sandwiches are the pinnacle for me, because I love my sandwiches.
When considering recipes, look at the timing of the steps. A recipe that fits with your schedule is more likely to be successful in the long run.
"The simplest breads are the most difficult to produce, and the baguette is high on the list of simple breads, in that it is made with a minimum of simple ingredients; there are no strong flavors that dominate, and it is above all the flavor of the flour that prevails. Properly made, it is magnificent, poorly made, it is bland and insipid. One of the more beautiful aspects of the baguette is the amount of crust it has. A finished baguette should have a rich, russet crust, crackling and fragrant -- don't underestimate the virtue of a bold bake. At the same time, the crumb should be creamy and aromatic, with a cell structure characterized by lots of random-sized holes, with translucent cell walls (if the holes are big enough to hide a mouse, though, your shaping skills need some attention)."
In order to match the capacities of a robot and a household oven, let's start with 500g of flour, which will give you 4 baguettes of about 40 centimetres, the following recipe: Flour T65: 500g Water: 330 g Baker's yeast: 10g Salt: 9g
The French poolish is prepared from half the pouring water of the basic recipe; the equivalent quantity of flour is then added. This gives us for our poolish: Water: 165g (330g/2) Flour T65 : 165g
We then have to add yeast to ferment our water-flour mixture. The amount of yeast depends directly on the time we allow our poolish to ferment at room temperature (generally from 3am to 6pm). The quantities of yeast (per litre of water) are as follows: 3H: 15g 5H: 8g 8H: 5g 15H: 1 to 2g Let's keep it overnight, about 12 hours, which will give a quantity of yeast of about 2g per liter of water. As we put 165g of water (or 0.165l), the amount of yeast will be 0.33g. We see that the amount of yeast to put in a poolish over 12 hours is almost infinitesimal So let's go back to our poolish recipe which will be: Water: 165g Flour T65 : 165g Baker's yeast: 0.3g Note that you never put salt in the poolish Mix everything together, cover with a cloth and leave to work overnight. The next morning you will see your poolish full of bubbles and slightly dug in its center, a sign that it is ready. I invite you to smell the wonder you have just produced....
You will now have to add your poolish to your bread dough ingredients. All you have to do is take the basic recipe and deduct the quantities used for your poolish, i.e.: Flour T65: 335g (500g - the 165g of the poolish) Water: 165g (330g - the 165g of the poolish) Baker's yeast: 9.7g (10g - the 0.3g of the poolish), which can be rounded to 9g Salt: 9g and we add our entire poolish to it. Then continue in the classic way. Remember to cover the dough and dough pieces well during rest periods to prevent them from crushing. Don't hesitate to bake your bread well; barely browned white bread seems to be out of fashion (except in baking terminals and supermarkets) and that's good.
Like the other reply stated, a lot of bread is technique. This is simply going to take some practice and/or experimentation. Sponge or no sponge? Are you going for a quick fix or are you willing to let part of the dough sit overnight, and the rest have 8 more hours to develop flavor?
Ingredients, as they said. Flour makes a difference. YEast makes a difference. Your water makes a difference, as does whether or not you put a bit of sugar in your dough.
But the other part of this is things like humidity. The humidity and temperature in the room is going to affect how much flour you need to use to produce identical results and will also affect how the bread rises.
All this stuff basically means that you have to practice, and then you might need to experiment a bit if you move to another part of the country or to another country - and why there is so much leeway in home recipes. Industrial bread can control for a lot of this stuff.
Not much actual work but it takes quite a lot of elapsed time.