I miss the simplicity of wheat bread, five common ingredients and you had fail proof bread! I'm getting pretty good at making decent non-wheat bread but it sure is picky sometimes. Lately I've been playing with mixing and its effect on the bread. I found a bread machine at the local thrift store that I decided to devote to my vile machinations (hee hee!) and see what difference it makes to the final product. I've been mixing by hand with a danish dough whisk and the results have been acceptable, but all the recipes I've surveyed want you to mix the sticky, stiff dough with a heavy duty mixer, which I sold about a week before I discovered I needed one! So I compared a hand whisked loaf with a bread machine loaf to find that the most obvious difference was rise time. The bread machine loaf rose much faster but otherwise taste, texture, airiness and final height really wasn't affected. Then I mixed on loaf in the bread machine for five minutes and the other I let mix for about half an hour. I then let them both rise and baked them side by side. The over-mixed loaf actually collapsed and was a rather sorry sight, but I don't know if it was over-mixing or over-rising, maybe both, but the five minute loaf rose beautifully and was the closest thing to bread I've made yet. So in general, you can get by with a hand mixed loaf (at least with a dough whisk!) but a mixer or bread machine makes things a little nicer, just don't over do it!
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