I used to work for a pancake restaurant for 15 years. I have made thousands of the things. I was the cook trainer and had to teach new cooks how to make lots of perfect pancakes, quickly. Right size, right colour, even circle, no oil marks, etc.
When I first started we used Aunt Jemima, mostly buttermilk and some buckwheat.
The Australian dollar went the wrong way against the US dollar, it became stupidly expensive to import US pancake mix and there seemed to be the odd bad batch, so they commissioned two Australian companies to make a local product. It took a lot of trials before they came up with something acceptable. Australian flour is different, they said at the time it is to do with US wheat is varieties suited to US soils and germinating in very cold, possibly even frozen ground. Australian soil has lower nutrients and drier conditions so different varieties of wheat are grown here. Australian flour made poor pancakes that needed additions to make them hold shape and taste right. they got there in the end.
I am gluten free now and would love if anyone has a good, made from scratch recipes for GF equivalent to AJ buttermilk pancakes, and made from scratch buckwheat pancakes.
As an aside, it is probably 20 years since I last worked at that pancake restaurant, but I STILL have the occasional nightmare of a horror shift working there. Usually a combination of understaffed and lots of demanding customers. I have even dreamed of suffocating in pancakes, with them all over my face till i can't breathe...
I make pancakes very rarely now, less than once a year. I still love real maple syrup, one of my "cooks treats" when cooking dinner is a little maple syrup in a glass of rice milk. (mostly dairy free too.)