Amateur home baker desperately seeks guidance

Without seeing your recipe, it is hard to give much advise.  Unfortunately,  I find that if I made a recipe once a week on a weekend, I have to make it quite a few times before I get an ideal for how it should look and feel when it is ready to go into the oven, and I still have questions about when is the perfect time to go into the oven.  I suggest you find a recipe for a bread you would like  ( baguette, ciabatta, whatever ) then read the instructions a few times,  get a scale, and make the recipe. Try not to get hung up on time, but instead check volume. If it says let it bulk ferment 1 hour to 1 1/2 hours until it doubles in size, I would basically ignore the hour to hour and a half, and instead put it is a straight sided container, use a rubber band to mark the height, then keep checking it till it is close to doubled in volume.  Then form it, and throw it in the oven in half the time it took to nearly double in volume.  Then make it a few more times, keeping track of the temperature of the room, how long it took to double in volume, how long you let it sit out for final proof, and what type of oven spring you got.  Eventually, you should get a handle on what works in your kitchen. 

You could just not be stretch and folding enough, without that strength, your loaf will never rise enough to spring back. It could also be just that your flour absorbs water differently, if your dough is so sticky that you can't handle it without it sticking to everything and tearing apart, you can just dust your hands and the surface with flour, the dough will pick up enough that it can be handled, but not so much that it will be dry, The flour will hydrate as the dough sits. A less hydrated dough will hold its shape more than spilling all over the place and being shapeless.

I do think it's mostly an issue of you needing to knead/stretch and fold the dough until it gains some strength, though. You will be able to feel the change in the consistency of the dough as you do it, it will start out feeling like a shapeless mass of flour and water, but will begin to tighten up and hold together and become cohesive, you'll feel the strength building in the dough.

It all depends what kind of recipe you are following.

I regulary make bloomers and though the dough is a wetter dough when I make it, due to the 15 min. kneading by hand it will become smooth and elastic.

You need to get gluten in to your dough.

As I said, we would need to know the recipe, is it a no knead bread or do  you knead it, do you knead it by hand or in the stand mixer ...

Hollywoods basic bloomer recipes are OK, and this is a basic, generic recipe. The quantities are fine, but personally, I'd not use the butter.

When its doing the first rise, make sure its covered and check it every 15 miuntes. Make sure it's in a reasonably warm room too. Airing cupboard, etc. and no-longer than one hour, at least initially.

Make sure the 2nd rise is on baking parchment on a baking tray - alternatively, divide that into two and put into 1lb bread tins. There are lots of videos online about shaping, but if you're hesitant, just gently flatten to about 10mm thick, roll it like a swiss roll and put it into a loaf tin, and again, no-more than one hour, covered, in a warm place.

But do check your flour - you need strong bread flour, not "plain flour". (I'm assuming you're in the UK here by using a Hollywood recipe, but hard to know though) so double check.

Ignore all the stuff about stretch & fold and wet doughs you'll read here - at least for now. Get used to handling/making basic bread before doing the more complex stuff. (although no-knead, stretch & fold can be easier, but you need to know what properly formed dough looks & fees like) I make bread daily (for sale) and rarely go over the water quantities you're using here. (and rarely use the stretch & fold methods)

And don't give up!

-Gordon

The principal sign of overproofing is that as the bake bakes, it collapses in height instead of growing in height.  From the moment you start your final proof, the yeast is causing the loaf to expand in volume.  Eventually, they will run out of food and die, and all the air that was contained in the loaf will escape and it will collapse back to the original size of the dough when you first kneaded it  ( you probably won't ever see that happen, because that takes a long time)  If it goes into the oven when it is about 80 to 90 % proofed, the heat of the oven will cause the yeast to give the dough a bit of a rise  ( called oven spring ) and the loaf will expand in the first part of the baking cycle and usually it will develop cracks in the top.   If it goes into the oven when it is overproofed, it will not increase in volume, and in fact, will sag a little. 

I've only been baking bread since last fall, so I remember all too well the temptation I felt, even as a newbie, to run before I could walk. Luckily, this didn't lead to any inedible disasters, but I know now that it would have been better to focus more on learning what dough feels like when it's ready to bake, and less on substituting ingredients, changing methods, etc. in recipes from which I had never produced a completely satisfactory result, or even in recipes I had never tried before.

So basically, I suggest you do as drogon said; practice Hollywood's recipe until you can get a decent result, preferably a few times in a row. Having done so, you'll be better prepared to expand your repertoire.  

Make sure the surface tension of the bread after shaping is tight. If it's loose, bread tends to spread sideways rather than upward. To make a tight surface, just pull down on the sides and flatten down the seam at the bottom. Make sure the seam is really sealed at the bottom as not to unravel during proofing.

Paul Hollywood has a very nice, simple video on You Tube where he tutors a group on the process of producing a nice Bloomer. 

I had no idea what a Bloomer was when I read your post initially.  Now I cant wait to give it  a try tonight.  Beautifully simple.