Making Bread - Machine is Best?

In an interesting post at Salad in a Jar, Paula explains why she uses a bread machine for making, but not baking, almost all of her bread.

The loaf on the left was kneaded by hand, while the one on the right was done in the bread machine. And, as she points out, the hand-kneaded loaf took 20 minutes of "hands-on" time to prepare, compared to 5 minutes for the machine-kneaded loaf. 

But Paul explains that she doesn't bake her bread in the machine for a variety of reasons, including because it tends to create a crust that is too thick and tough, and you get those weird holes in the bottom of the loaf. Those are two of the reasons why we never really got into bread machine bread. But it never dawned on me to use the machine to do the grunt work, and then bake the loaf in the oven. Doh! I'm not sure if we still have a bread machine in a box in the garage somewhere. I might have to look into that. If not, maybe I can find a good one on eBay or something.