Recipes, Good, Bad or Useless?

In my journey to kitchen expertise, I spent years, like many people, following recipes. Sometimes they worked out great, often not. After doing this for years I came to the conclusion that I had learned very little about cooking, and a lot about following a recipe. I don't want to be an expert recipe follower, I want o be an expert cook. While recipes are useful things, they have several very important deficiencies.

1. When they don't work, you don't know why.
2. Without the exact ingredients, you can't make the recipe.
   
3. It is not possible to know what can be safely substituted or skipped.
4. It is hard to have any idea what a recipe will taste like before you make it.
5. There is no way to tweak the recipe safely to suit personal preferences.

So, what to do? I am going to start providing some explanations for the underlying principles behind some recipes and then offering a template for the recipe and then some suggestions for making the recipe your own and some examples of some of the resulting recipes.