Good bread is like wine or cheese: The same ingredients can lead to completely different results, depending on the fermentation's conditions. And it needs ripeness (the unbaked dough, of course.) Not weeks, or months, like wine or cheese, but hours to days.
It cannot simply be done by mixing the ingredients, let the yeast prove the dough, then bake it. Well, it can - if the result satisfies you. That's all what a bread machine does: mixing and baking. It cannot watch or rate the grade of the dough's ripeness, because that's a complex proccess involving several parameters like kinds and quality of flours used, possible additional ingredients, temperature, humidity... Those cannot simply be measured and evaluated with our kitchen equipment. You need the experience of many breads baked, keep an eye on the dough, smell it,...to get a good and tasty bread.
I wouldn't started to bake my own bread if there were bakeries left within a reasonable distance still baking good bread. But most bakeries switched to frozen par-baked breads they buy from industrial mass production and let their saleswomen finish them in the shop's oven directly. (That's why you often get in different "bakeries" in different regions the exact same supply offered.) Of course, it's less work for the bakery. You don't need qualified bakers anymore, trained saleswomen do. The quality is low(er), but constant and predictable. And most people buy it. If they don't buy their bread in supermarkets, which is even more convient to buy everything in a single location, even if the quality is even lower.
But once you ate a good, artisanal produced bread, you not only know why I'm talking of "low" quality of industrial products, but you also want it again - best being your daily bread.
While the whole world bakes bread mostly from wheat only, in Germany, and probably other countries too, maybe Poland, Czechia,... - I don't know, we prefer bread not only made from sourdough but also from a mixture of wheat and ray flours: dark, dense, small porous, characteristic own taste:
typical german bread
We cut our bread in slices of ~0.5...1cm, spread butter on it, and place thin slices of cheese, ham, salami, other sausages or other stuff like jam on it. Those are commonly eaten for breakfast or supper, (in germany commonly lunch is dinner.)
For most others, our bread is too heavy, tastes too strange, when you're used to light whitebreads, only. "Extreme" cases are
black bread, very popular in west-nothern germany (you can get it even in restaurants as a dish, served e.g. with typical, small nordsea shrimp and fried eggs), or it's "most extreme" variant
Pumpernickel, which ain't made from a dough at all, but is in fact only ray grist (only roughly grinded wholemeal ray) sintered for many hours at low temperatures - very special, very tasty, very nutrishing.
You can make a German living in France, Italy, Spain, Switzerland, UK,... especially outside Europe a real joyfully gift by bringing a loaf of good german bread. Not that there were bad breads - in contrary, I know and appriciate the good breads baked in the whole world, but if you've grown up with german bread you simply insist on have such once in a while.
And if you cannot buy one, for whatever reasons, you start baking yourself.
Which, as I said, is not really that much work. It's four working steps of a few minutes each. The rest of the time, you just wait your dough ferments.
But to give you something you can see ripeness makes a difference: You talked pizza dough. Really simple in fact: wheat flour, water, a tiny bit of salt, and yeast. Some may add a
tiny dash of olive oil, but that's it. No eggs, and above all no sugar! It's not a cake!
Next time you plan to bake pizza, plan some days ahead. Start your dough: mix the ingredients and knead the dough the first time, but use very few yeast, point of a knife. The dough will take several hours to prove (over night). Knead it good again, put it into some closed tupperware box at least twice the size (plastic bag will also do), and put it in the fridge(!) for two or three days. Then take it out a couple of hours before you bake, and let it prove again. You already will smell the difference, when you take the dough out, and you will see: your pizza also tastes better.
