Your scale is lying to you and it's not the calibration

I keep seeing people blame their scale when their loaves come out dense, and 9 times out of 10 it's the flour. I bake at home in Denver and for two years I weighed everything to the gram, checked my scale against a quarter, the whole thing, and still got bricks. Turns out my cheap store brand bread flour was running around 10% protein while the bag said 12%, so my dough never had the strength to hold a decent rise. Switched to a milled flour from a shop up in Boulder and the same recipe with zero changes gave me a crumb I could actually be proud of. Weigh your flour, sure, but then ask what's actually in the bag before you start blaming your technique. Has anyone else tested their flour's protein and found the label was way off?