Here is where a little-used, but I believe extremely useful technique excels; the whey culture.
Using a whey culture, you can establish a local flora cheese pretty easily, even if you proceed to use pasteurized milk for your commercial cheeses. The solution: make a batch with raw milk, establish the diverse culture, and then those strains will be introduced into future batches of sterilized cheese. Simple, but it takes work to maintain a whey culture. You have to constantly be testing your culture, taking care of it, preserving it, incubating it, backing it up in case of failure, and making sure it is of the proper acidity when you put it in your cheese. It's just not as easy as measuring out a little powder.
The cheeses I make use no microbial adjuncts whatsoever. I do not add any ripening ingredients other than the basic culture. I do not rub it down with b. linens or whatever. I allow the local, natural things to grow, but wash the cheese in such a way as to cause favourable things to grow. The result is I have b. linen rinds, even though I have never bought any b. linen cultures.
Really, I think everyone should learn about cheesemaking in a traditional light, if they are serious about it. So many people all they know is the danisco powders, or what have you. I have never purchased a commercial culture, and don't intend to. I decided when setting out to make my cheeses that I was going to get my hands on the real, traditional thing, and continue to make my cultures in the old style. But before it got here, I made cheeses using yogurts and found that through careful manipulation of a Greek style yogurt, you actually wind up with a genuine, full fledged alpine flavor in your cheese.
I think passing on a whey culture has such a tremendous effect on the character of your cheese -it is not something that I think can be replicated with commercial powdered starters, even if you mix a bunch together with ripeners, molds, and all that crazy nonsense. You may be able to come up with something impressive doing that, but I think the results of doing it the old way just can't be beat.
But then again, I am Swiss after all, so I'm bound to think that the old way has to be the right way.