My kitchen scale is older than my oldest Philodendron gloriosum, and it lives on the same shelf as the bark. That should tell you something. The shelf above it holds five-gallon buckets of pumice, orchid bark in three grades, coco chips that have been rinsed within an inch of their lives, sphagnum from two suppliers because I trust neither completely, perlite, charcoal, worm castings in a yogurt tub, and a brick of coir I keep meaning to throw out. The scale is for the recipes I actually use.
I used to mix by feel. Most of us start that way, scooping handfuls of this and that until the pot looks right, and for the easy plants it works. Then you kill a verrucosum in a peat-heavy big-box mix, or watch the roots on an Anthurium warocqueanum turn to mush in something that drained beautifully in your living room but compacted in the basement under lights, and you start writing things down. What follows are the four recipes I keep coming back to. Not because they're clever. Because over years and many plants, they fail the least.