I’ve always found King Arthur to be reliable? Their recipes are good and include metric, you can get the flour anywhere and they’re very proactive with support if you have questions about tweaking. Also good books.

Good bread exists, it’s just not cheap like it is in Europe.

I think you'll find two things are true about American bulk baked goods:

- The quality is highly uniform.

- The quality is highly bland.

As with any mass-produced food, the goals are typically quantity and low cost, though often with a putative appearance of quality or artisanal character. The compromises are largely against a high-quality product, though there are places where this may be found, albeit at far higher prices.

Of you may bake your own.

The american pallet is simply different and all our breads tend to be sweeter. The other part of this is that amercian breads tend to only use 1 grain, wheat. And they tend to either use whole wheat or bleached wheat.

Even when something is a "9 grain" bread, usually what that actually means is it's wheat bread with other grains in the crust.

Very hard to find a rye bread in the US.

not disagreeing, the US certainly doesn't have the variety of France/Belgium/Germany, and the average is certainly much worse.

But, there are local bakeries here and there and many of them seem to make pretty good breads? Maybe I don't know what you're specifically looking for though. I'm in LA at the moment and I can be both frustrated with the average but still find some good stuff.

I enjoy a local Pittsburgh bakery Mancini's. That's my benchmark for "good bread", I've never been to Europe though.

Eh, I found the Seattle artisanal bakeries (Fremont, Grand Central) to be better than all but the best I’ve found in Europe.