Making bread by hand is hard, are breadmakers better?

There's no finer pleasure than starting the day with a slice of hot, fresh bread dripping in salted butter. Poets have waxed on about the joys of transforming so few ingredients into such a beautiful foodstuff for millennia. But unless life has been very good to you, it's probably not often you wake up to freshly-made bread wafting from your kitchen. Are breadmakers the answer to this, the most first-world of first-world problems? And are they able to match or outdo the stuff I can make by hand?...