> In reality, most cakes can be made by dumping the ingredients together in a bowl, mixing, and then baking.

Most 'proper' baking needs a scale, and how many American kitchens have that?

I’d assume most? I got one in university shortly after I moved out, and since combining kitchens with my wife and getting a more precise scale for coffee, now have several more than I actually need.

I bake like once a year, and even discounting my daily coffee, I still use a scale several times a week.

I really hope that's said somewhat sarcastically. I pessimistically assume not though.

You're right. To do things you need tools. If you're gonna bake, a scale is a useful tool. It's a pretty small hurdle to jump.

I guess it's funny that on this site there are long threads about rooting phones, or restoring old hardware, or using assembler to patch old software, but also threads which laud the use of cake-mixes and treat baking as Impossible because, you know, no scales...

It's about convenience and nostalgia.

This reminds me of the thread where people were telling the founders of Dropbox that they'd fail, because it's "so easy" to just set up a Linux box with rsync.

While I agree there's more to baking that mixing stuffin a bowl a scale only gets you in the right ballpark, when baking from ingredient there's always some variation in temp or humidity or ingredients that screw you over compared to an industrial process or even a professional bakery with controlled environment and supplies. The rest comes from experience I guess.

There are lots of tools that it's not reasonable to expect a random home kitchen to have -- expensive grinders and mixers, mortar and pestle, double boilers, marble rolling pin to press out pastry, etc. But a kitchen scale is just a huge win for any kitchen. They don't take much space, they're not at all expensive, and it takes less time to convert "half a cup of flour" into grams using your phone than it does to wash the measuring cup.

The only thing they as is most people don't have cake flour even though it is near the flour in the store. (5 boxes vs a whole shelf of all purpose). Little things like that matter but many try to cheat anyway and then the box is better.

I've baked many delicious cakes using the standard flour. For some recipes it will matter, for many it's not as big of a difference in the final result.

So confidently incorrect. The proof that they add value is in their popularity. They also do, in fact, contain ingredients that people don't have at home, which matter.

Mickey D's is also a whole lot more popular than home-made burgers. Proof of their quality according to your logic, I guess.