Went through this exact thing two years ago when my wife got tired of lopsided pb&j sandwiches. What finally settled it for me was splitting the batch, bake one loaf in the pullman and one in my old pan, then freeze the square one for the week. Kid gets her neat slices, I still get my crackly top on the weekend loaf, everybody wins. Word of warning though, that lid squashes the rise hard, so I had to bump my dough up by about 15 percent or the corners came out pinched and sad. Also let the loaf sit in the pan ten minutes before you slide the lid off and flip it, otherwise the steam makes the bottom gummy. Your buddy is not wrong that a lid changes the crust, but he is wrong that it ruins anything, it just makes a different bread. A pullman is a tool for a job, and if that job is lunchbox slices, it does it better than anything else in my kitchen.

Did you ever dig somewhere where the trash turned out to be the whole story? I used to be all about the arrowheads and pottery, like if it wasnt pretty it wasnt worth picking up. Then I worked a site in the Southwest where the best thing we found was a bunch of fire cracked rock and some tiny seeds in a trash pit. That pit told us when people were there, what they ate, and how they cooked, stuff a fancy bowl in a case never could. Now I get excited over ash layers and broken tools, which sounds weird but its true. The flashy stuff is nice but the boring stuff is what actually talks.