The "cup scooping is fine if you know what you're doing" crowd is missing the point, because the real problem is that a cup of flour can weigh anywhere from 4 to 6 ounces depending on how packed it is, and thats a huge swing in a recipe. So even if you learn to scoop the same way every time, you're still baking a different bread than the person who wrote the recipe, which means you're fixing problems that don't even exist in your kitchen. Weighing takes all that guessing out and lets you actually judge your kneading and rise times instead of wondering if the dough is wrong because of your hands or because you added an extra half cup of flour. Plus once the flour is right, you can change one thing at a time and know for sure what made the loaf better or worse. I get why people are proud they got good bread without a scale, but thats like saying you learned to drive without a speedometer, it works until it doesn't. Ten bucks and a boring Sunday of practice beats months of blaming your own hands for a measuring problem.