To make better bread, don't get a breadmaking machine.
Instead, get a digital scale (1g sensitivity) and use it for weighing the flour AND the water.
Flour does NOT greatly change day-to-day with humidity (a myth dating back long before the internet spread it). Flour is sold by weight - how would that work if it was absorbing different amounts of moisture each day?
But volume measurement ("cups") is comically inaccurate.
As is the printing on most measuring jugs.
You can do much better very easily - just weigh out the quantities.
If you can get ±1% accuracy on both flour and water (instead of ±10%) then baking consistently good bread gets much easier. And you don't have to blame the weather.
An eBay £10 pocket scale with 0.1g precision is going to be an improvement for measuring the salt to a similar reproducibility. But salt quantity is mainly a matter of taste ...
The yeast measurement is surprisingly not critical for manual baking - yeast/time/temperature for fermentation can be adjusted (by eye) by any would-be baker, but machines expect fixed quantities for their fixed-time programming!
A trace of Vitamin C makes the dough stronger, and able to hold a rise better. This is particularly important with wholemeal bread baking.
Allow time to be an ingredient.
Fast-fermented bread does not taste as good as slow-fermented!
Don't try to rush 'rising' by using extra heat. (Or extra yeast - but do try using less yeast than a recipe indicates, and allowing a longer rise-time to compensate.) 'Warm Room' temperature is just fine for dough fermentation.
"Baby's bottle" temperature is the most that yeast should EVER be exposed to (before it expires in the oven). So don't add hot water to the yeast!
Be patient, give it more rise time if it wants - it'll be better for it.
Don't let the dough surface dry out while its rising. Keep it covered. I now use lidded plastic tubs, which are simple and stackable.
Do start the bake in a steamy oven.
Have a flattish metal dish ready heated in the bottom of the oven, put the loaf in the oven, then put boiling water in the hot dish (beware of the steam!) and close the oven swiftly. With some fan ovens it may help to briefly switch off the oven when loading, to prevent the steam being blown back at you!
Remove the dish if any water remains after 1/3 of the baking time. (This is why the quantity of boiling water isn't really important - something like a cupful should be fine.)
Opening the oven, to check and remove the dish, does itself help to drop the oven humidity nicely for the final part of the bake.
Do try baking 'rustic' loaves on a (well-preheated) pizza stone (or slab of granite, or slate, or whatever) instead of using a loaf tin.
Main difficulty is loading the shaped dough into the oven. Solution is to prep the loaf on a piece of (floured) baking parchment, and load that, with the loaf, onto the hot stone in the oven.
You can remove the parchment at the same time as you remove the steam dish.
Don't rush to cut or eat the bread. Let it cool for a while on a rack. If you want a softer crust, then while its still hot, cover it with a clean dish towel, damp if you like a very soft crust.
Baking good bread is easy and doesn't require much 'hands-on' time.
But it does mean paying attention to details.
And an easy one to get right is accurate measurement of flour and liquid.
