Most of what you read about pizza is really a description of one person's kitchen that has been promoted into a rule, and I have spent a while trying to work out which parts of that advice actually travel and which only ever worked where they were written down.
Everyone gets there a different way
If you spend any time reading about dough, you start to notice that people arrive at more or less the same crust from completely different directions. Some swear by a cold ferment, others by a long one, others by a same-day dough that never sees the inside of a fridge. Some bulk before balling and some ball first. There is poolish, there is biga, there is straight dough with nothing clever in it at all, and hydration anywhere from the low sixties to ninety per cent. Nearly all of it produces something light and open, and nearly everyone will tell you that their particular route is the one that matters.
They cannot all be right, but I do not think they are all wrong either, and that gap is what got me interested in the first place. My suspicion is that the things actually doing the work are not the variables everyone argues about. They are the ones none of us can measure in a home kitchen.
What I can and cannot measure
The tools I have are the same ones everybody has. I watch for the dough to double, I check the windowpane, I use a pH strip, and I pay attention to whether a poolish still smells sweet or has tipped over into something more alcoholic. All of that works, and I rely on it. The trouble is that these are rough measures designed to help you hit the same result twice with your own dough, and what I usually want to do is harder than that: compare two doughs built from genuinely different inputs and work out which difference caused what.
What I would really like is a single probe that could tell me pH and acid composition, temperature, how much yeast is alive and working, how much sugar is left, what is coming off the dough in the way of volatile compounds, and how the whole thing behaves under stress. Hand that to home bakers and I suspect a good deal of confident advice would quietly disappear.
The tradeoff I keep running into
After enough batches you notice that most decisions collapse into a single one. The dough has to be extensible enough to open without tearing and strong enough to spring in the oven, and almost everything you can do pushes it towards one of those at the expense of the other. Poolish, warmth and more water buy extensibility; biga, cooler handling and a stronger flour buy structure and a puffier rim.
Once I started seeing it that way a lot of the choices got easier, because I stopped thinking I was picking a method and started thinking I was picking a point on a line.
Fermenting at 29 °C
My kitchen sits at around 29 °C for most of the year, which is warmer than almost every recipe assumes and warm enough that a dough can get away from you while you are busy doing something else. No recipe written in Europe accounts for any of that, and a fair amount of what I have learned has been the slow business of working out which numbers travel and which were only ever true where someone happened to write them down.
Why I write down the failures
A dough that comes out well tells me I was somewhere inside the window, which is reassuring without being especially informative. A dough that fails tells me where the edge is, and that turns out to be both the more useful piece of information and the more expensive one to buy. So the over-proofed ones go into the log alongside the good ones, together with the batches that tore on opening and the experiment that came back inconclusive because I could not get a planetary mixer to autolyse gently.