Sometimes, it seems like that if you follow the receipes measurements exactly, your food almost never tastes like what you expect. There always needs a bit of human discretion.
As such, I find video recipes to be far more effective. You can see them cook and get a feel of what "cook meat until brown" really means, or what is a "sprinkle of green onion"
My path to learning to cook was to watch nearly the entire run of Good Eats, picking out recipes that seemed like fun, but more focusing on using the knowledge and skills to do my own thing.
The host of Good Eats and I appear to have radically different tastes, so, ironically, whenever I've actually made one of Alton's recipes from the show that taught me how to cook, neither my wife or I have liked them. Perhaps some I simply messed up, but certainly not all of them. But with what I learned from that show I've become at least "decent". Couldn't cook in a restaurant or anything, but I can perform one of the higher skills of home cooking, "see what's left in the pantry -> make something from what you have -> get requests for the 'recipe'".
The back and forth reading that you have to do results in errors because you lose your place, skip a step, add an ingredient in the wrong order, etc. That really impacts the results. In this vein, I've been working on a format that lets you just go top to bottom with much better results. Would love to hear your thoughts.
I'll also admit that when I'm dialing something in ("needs more X") that obviously that's not prepped ahead of time.
Anything else I find it easier and cleaner to just have a bowl of X ready to go. It goes in the dishwasher within minutes of using it, and my cutting board and such was already cleaned.
I'm think of you aren't breaking on natural prep separations but just on traditional recipe steps, then the action-first approach of the active format is superior (since awareness of the actions is essential to planning prep), but for people with less kitchen experience (or that want to spend less effort analyze the recipe before executing) the standard format--possibly with explicit prep separations--is the best way to go. Failing to prep before starting execution is a common source of failure, and while separating pero can work, doing prep one action at a time rarely works well.
An example: http://www.cookingforengineers.com/recipe/200/Osso-Buco
Do you have plans to incorporate full meals on the site, such as a meat dish with two sides and how to cook them all together, to come out at the same time?
At the beginning it is things like mistaking whipping cream for heavy cream, not knowing what "browned" looks like, or other "rookie" mistakes that basically translate to "not actually following the recipe".
As you get more ambitious, you start to tackle things like baking that require an intuition for how much to knead, how sticky is too sticky, etc.
Or you start to try recipes that run many things in parallel. Last time I made chicken sauteed in butter, each step was easy enough, but suddenly they have to be done in parallel and the sauce has to be done before the chicken and the potatoes need to be ready at the same time and everything has to happen fast... That was the moment I felt I really understood "cooking", when the timer for the sauce timer was beeping and the chicken was smoking and the potatoes were getting cold.
Another problem is that many recipes use the wrong metric for ingredients in the first place - most things should be done by weight, not volume.
But yes, in terms of cooking (as opposed to baking) one should never expect to follow a recipe exactly, no matter what. Everything should be tasted and modified to adjust along the way. Eventually one gets a sense of what those phrases really mean, particularly if you see the same person's recipes repeatedly.