I also found if easier - and the feedback cycle was immediate so I did it multiple times and improved.

But of course it has no flavor, or more accurately all the flavor comes from the milk, so your milk supply matters a lot.

Try making burrata. The cream inside dun changed the game.

No, it's just hard to make traditional mozzarella, it takes more than a day and careful control of acidity. The "30 minute" recipes are faster and easier because they substitute the long acidification of the traditional recipes with instant acidification (with citric acid, vinegar etc) but they have a very high failure rate. If you search for "mozzarella" on r/cheesemaking you can see that maybe one out of three are from people who couldn't make it work:

https://www.reddit.com/r/cheesemaking/search/?q=mozzarella&r...

That must be an underestimate too, because the people most likely to post on reddit to tell everyone about their mozzarella are the ones who had a "success!!!" with it.

Well aware of this difference, thus my use of quotes and italics to differentiate.

Also, if you want to make traditional mozzarella, you need hard to find buffalo milk, ideally from the Italian breed.