If you ever get a chance to tour an industrial bread operation (I've done it twice), jump at the chance. It is truly eye-opening to see loaves of bread as far as the eye can see. But what you really want to watch for is how they do quality control. (And they won't generally talk about that much, for good reason, also because it's not very interesting except to another baker.)
A commercial bakery of the size you've worked in (600 loaves/day is a fairly big shop) has access to a few ingredients (types and grades of flour, for example) that we don't really have access to at home, as well as a few pieces of equipment, like a 40 quart mixer, tightly controlled environment proofers and steam injection ovens, but I think a good home baker can do about 95% of what those bakeries can do.
Dough behaves differently in a 40 quart mixer than at home, but mostly that's a matter of limiting over-oxidation of the dough while working it more evenly. Proofing in an 80/80 box (80% humidity at 80 degrees) is a little tricky to match at home, and there's no substitute for that steam lever, but I think I can get close enough that I'd stack some of my best efforts against any bakery in town.
Peter Reinhart talks about the batch of bread that won his prize as being magical, and that magic is something I try to achieve every time I bake, and it really only gets magical once every few weeks.
The bakery I would almost pay to work at for a week is Chad Robertson's Tartine Bakery in San Francisco. His books are delightful to read and his bread is out of this world on an average day and almost a religious experience on a day when the magic happens.
Where the home baker fails is consistency. A commercial bakery HAS to be consistent, because customers demand it, but some days it's just better than others. Our families will eat what we bake for them even if we miss the mark from time to time. (Ï'm not sure my wife even notices when I slightly under-proof or over-proof dough or when the baking is just a tad short or over, though I do.)
I've probably only thrown away loaves of bread around 20 times over the years, and some of those were experimental recipes. My wife will never forget the time I (apparently) put in 4X the salt instead of 1 part salt and 3 part sugar in an Austrian Malt bread. But to be fair, I remember the time she tried to make an angel food cake using powdered sugar instead of cake flour, and we both remember her first attempt to bake me an angel food cake 45 years ago, when neither of us knew that the lower element in the oven in our apartment wasn't working, so essentially she baked it under the broiler.
Of all the books I have on baking bread, Hamelman's book does the best job of translating what happens in a commercial scale bakery into the home.
What has always amazed me about small scale bakeries is the breadth of their daily output, not only do they do dozens of loaves of several types of bread every day but also several dozen types of donuts plus cookies, rolls, brownies, cakes and pies.
When we were first married there were two incredible bakeries in Evanston Illinois, and at least one of them, Bennisons, is still there and still going strong, though under different ownership. Their lead baker is truly a master baker, and he has the Couple du Monde cup in his window to prove it. I'd stage for a week under Jory Downer at the drop of a hat, too, in fact he's the reason I joined the Bread Baker's Guild of America. Just being a member of an organization that has bakers like Jory, and Peter Reinhart and Jeff Hamelman is worth the $85 annual dues to me, though their quarterly newsletter is also worth the annual dues.
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