It’s baking. Baking is an exact science.
Two come to mind:
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When I figured out that stirring with a spatula yields smoother cornstarch-based sauces and puddings a spoon, as a spatula covers more surface area per stir.
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When I discovered that made-from-scratch chocolate pudding is much creamier and more delicious than the kind from a mix and is almost as easy. (Include a dash of cream with the whole milk and stir in a few chocolate chips just after removing it from the heat, and you may not want to share.)
Cooking bacon in the oven a whole pound at a time instead of a few slices in a frying pan a buncha times.
The other day I realized that, in contrast to my usual practice, I don’t have to carefully peel hard boiled eggs for egg salad. Just chop through the shell with a knife and scoop out the interior, which is just going to get chopped up anyway. A whole lot less hassle, and why the hell didn’t I think about this decades ago?
True, it’s a science, but there’s a reasonable amount of slop in baking. It’s not as exact as some people make it out to be, but it’s important to know that ratios are far more important than in regular cooking. I guess that’s one thing I learned about baking is to trust my instincts for how the dough should look and feel. I mostly bake bread, though, which is surprisingly forgiving, in my experience.
That said, for maximum repeatability and consistency, just use the scales.
Oh! I have another one for egg salad. I don’t usually have problems peeling the eggs, but it’s always a hassle to chop them. Enter this Serious Eats recipe. You don’t chop the eggs, you just mush them in your hands. A ton easier, and a stress-reliever too. DIE EGG! DIE! I WILL CRUSH YOU WITH MY BARE HANDS! 
Veggie dicers are another easy way to do up your eggs. (Those hand contraptions with a crosshatch of wires in the middle.) Just do one pass, then sort the cuttings into two stacks and do each of those.
Nine times out of ten you’ll probably want to leave salt out of the recipe. All recipes call for four times too much noodles.
This is so wrong. Learning to appropriately season dishes is one of the basic lessons of cooking.
As someone said upthread, put lots of salt in your pasta water, and no oil! Yes, the oil keeps the pasta from sticking together, it also keeps the sauce from sticking to the pasta.
I have learned that it is perfectly acceptable to brown your meat at the end rather than the beginning.
I tried to find the recipe I learned this from to do a cite, but no luck. 
About baking, and sloppiness vs science:
Cooking is science too, in one sense. I think the difference is that many if not most baking recipes rely on relatively precise proportions of certain ingredients (often the water and the fat), or on chemical reactions, to prevent them from objectively failing (failing to even be a loaf of bread, or whatever, vs just not tasting good).
The oil is more, really, to help against boilovers, not so much to keep the pasta from sticking together (after all, the oil just floats on top, so doesn’t really intermix with the pasta while it’s cooking at all.) When you pour it out, yes, it can contribute to the issue of keeping sauce from sticking to the pasta, so, yes, don’t use oil.
As far as browning meat at the end, yes, that is completely acceptable, depending on what you’re trying to do. Obviously, for a stew or braise, that’s a non-starter, but for a dry roast or steak, it works very well. The idea is you start the meat and cook it at a low temperature, such that that it roasts evenly and dries out the exterior. Once your meat reaches the target temp, minus a couple degrees, you sear it on a very hot surface to create the lovely flavors associated with the Maillard reaction. As your meat has been cooking and the exterior has dried, it browns much more easily and quickly and you end up with a cut of meat that is evenly cooked on the inside, while being beautifully seared on the outside. “Reverse sear” is what the technique is usually known as.
Mum? When did you get an account on here?
Discovering the effects of seasoning was my cooking game changer. My mother doesn’t believe in adding salt, and I was brought up on food that pretty much tasted of bland.
Eta: her Dad oversalted everything, probably why.
I’ll add brining leaner meats.
Almost any poultry and a lot of pork cooked dry will be better with a brine.
Whether grilling, smoking, baking/roasting or frying, brining should be considered.
A whole chicken might be ok and few brine ribs or a pork butt but loins, wings, breasts, chops, even drumsticks should probably take a salty swim for at least a few hours.
This doesn’t apply to wet cooking like a braise, stew/chili, soup, tinga, etc.
That’s probably true at home but the tolerances in commercial settings are pretty tight. Take a high visibility example: a bakery making McDonald’s hamburger buns. The world is dotted with these giant facilities to bake goods to supply the restaurants. These aren’t bakeries you can pop in to pick up a half dozen rolls. They are in industrial parks, very secure and receive flour by the railcar. McDonalds values consistency very highly, perhaps above all else other than safety concerns. The ovens are calibrated, the ingredient suppliers are audited, the water is filtered & analyzed, bun color is evaluated, the sesame seeds are counted.
I can confirm that one quality controlled item is analysis of mositure content of the incoming flour. If it’s a little more humid this week than last, the flour will have absorbed a bit more moisture from the air and the plant operators compensate by adding less water to the dough batch. It may seem over the top but that’s what it takes to be a ‘tier 1’ supplier for the Golden Arches.
Absolutely. Like I said, “for maximum repeatability and consistency, just use the scales.” In any commercial setting, that would be exactly what is needed, not just for baking, but really for any commercial product. I do the same thing with sausages. My sausage recipes have their ingredients go down to the gram per kilogram of meat level, as I want my sausages to be very consistent, as each iteration is an attempt to adjust the spacing exactly to my likings. My bratwurst recipe, for instance, took a good six or seven iterations before it was down. But it’s still fine sausage even if I just eyeball it. I just don’t want to scare people off from baking thinking if they’re a little bit off on one of their ingredients, there will be disaster. I can make a good loaf of bread without any measuring devices whatsoever, and I can probably teach anyone how to make it on the fly, too. But if you want consistently the exact same loaf of bread, of course you want to weigh everything.
You are of Polish descent, live in a Polish part of Chicago and make your own brats and other sausages? Dude, when’s dinner? I am so there. Do you make sauerkraut to go with them? Oh, man - please just say No just so I don’t hear any more! 
I do not typically make my own sauerkraut, so you’re safe (although I have once, just for fun.) That said, the Polish supermarket I go to has barrels of homemade sauerkraut that you just stick your tongs in and pack it yourself into a bag, so I’ve found making my own to be kind of unnecessary. 
Are you still buying spices from the Durkee/French’s/McCormick section? My big aha! was the Hispanic aisle, where all the spices are half the price or less. Pasta is usually a great buy there, and the quality is fine!
A squirt of lemon juice or vinegar on most any deli/veg sandwich wakes up all of the flavors, especially of the veggies. There was a long gone sandwich shop when I was a kid, lines out the door, that made the most incredible mouthwatering sandwiches ever. They misted every sandwich with a spray bottle of red wine vinegar as it came down the line.
The problem I’ve found is trying to find baking recipes that are measured by weight instead of by volume.