I've started doing two different temperatures for exactly the reasons you cite. I do the initial part (lid on the pot) at 475F and the subsequent part (lid of) at 400F. This seems to reduce the over-browning of the crust, while still letting the heat get all the way through to the center. I'm now doing 30 minutes lid-on and 30-minutes lid-off. Last time, I ended up with an internal temperature of 196 degrees (yeah, shiny new temperature probe), when I pulled it out. Works for me.

I recently ordered some high-gluten white flour and some medium rye flour (from King Arthur Flour), since you can't find that stuff in the supermarket. Once it arrives, I'm going to have a go at doing a German rye bread and a sourdough bread, both of which require non-trivial advance work (i.e., wild-yeast fermentation). My cookbook says that it's going to smell really bad in the beginning but that the smell will come around by the time the starter is ready to bake. We'll see...