From my experience a very robust process will always yield good results while a weak process will yield good results for some people some of the time much like you describe in grandmas recipe. What Alton does really well is show you a number of different cooking process/tricks that can be used from one recipe to the next. Even if you never cook the Alton recipe ever again you can borrow the process that Alton used and make a different or poorly documented recipe better. Between Kenji and Alton they have really come up with some great time saving/simplifications tricks that I used beyond their original recipes. But he is process-oriented, not results-oriented
My complaint about Alton Brown and "process" is that he overemphasizes how fragile that process is, not how robust it is. Like, he smash-zooms in and leers at you and says "DON'T. overstir" as if it'll cause Mogwai to turn into Gremlins or some shit. Compare to the guys at ATK - they make the recipe a dozen times and vary it and tell you what you need to worry about and don't and lo and behold, most of it you don't. Make no mistake - I think Alton Brown did a real service to cooks everywhere by demistifying a lot of the chemical and physical processes involved. But he's also got people convinced that unless you perform a religious amount of tweaking your food will suck. It amuses me to no end that if you ask the internet, the perfect roast chicken is Thomas Keller's, which is literally salt, pepper and trussing. But if you ask the internet, the perfect roast turkey is Alton Brown's, which takes two fuckin' days and $30 in brine. There's adoration, there's emulation, but there's no synthesis. Julia Child took on a roast chicken Season 1 Episode 1. Compared to Thomas Keller, she fuckin' mauls that thing. But you know what? You do it Julia's way, it cooks more evenly. I guess you don't get to charge $67 for it, though.