Baking with ambiant yeast

An excerpt from The Lost Art of Real Cooking describes how to collect local and random yeast to make a starter, with a claim that commercial home-baking yeast sacrifices flavor to get speed.

He just describes doing this himself, and I'm willing to believe he's getting great sourdough, but I was wondering if anyone reading this has tried their own ambient yeast and what the results were.

He's also got a theory that it's easier to follow recipes that are just written in prose, without the ingredients at the top. I'll probably be trying his book out-- following recipes does feel like an unnecessarily nervous process of keeping track.