Yeah, it's the norm to have a standard pale malt which gets used for almost everything - there's not a huge difference between different "standard" pale malts of the same level of kilning. You've not said what kind of beers you're into, if you're planning lagers then you want a pilsner or extra-pale malt, otherwise just standard British pale malt or one of the named varieties thereof.
You have to be aware that traditionally since malt was heavy and expensive, people generally took a recipe and substituted in their "local" base malt for cost reasons - so Germans would make a English bitter recipe with pilsner malt, in North American they would use US 2-row and so on. Such attempts to make foreign beers with local ingredients can evolve into styles of their own - eg the origins of American Amber ales lie in US attempts to make bitter with 2-row and local caramel malts.
Conversely you have to be aware of the "Chinese whisper" effect when using foreign recipes - I've seen Brits trying to make a bitter based on an American recipe, and asking what exotic & expensive replacements they can find in the UK to substitute for US 2-row and Victory malt, when those are only in the recipe as a US approximation to bog-standard UK pale malt.
On the assumption that if you can afford an all-in-one you're not going to be quibbling too much about a quid or two extra, then it's probably worth going for named varieties like Maris Otter or Golden Promise rather than generic pale malt made from a blend of industrial varieties.
The average barley variety has a typical lifespan of only 10 years or so before it gets superceded by new varieties with marginal gains in yield, disease resistance etc. We've talked about this
more over on HBT, but the key graph is this one. Twenty years ago it was all Optic as
the summer variety and Pearl as the winter barley. Then Tipple took over, but since then it diversified somewhat - Propino and Concerto and Venture were big 5 years ago but have now been largely replaced by Planet and Laureate. This graph gives you an idea of how fluid things are.
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Maris Otter and Golden Promise are the exceptions to the rule, in that they have effectively assumed "heritage" status and are kind of outside the normal barley market. But 95% of malt is made from varieties on the AHDB Recommended List of malting barleys, which are a dozen or so varieties that have been tested over a number of years in different regions, so that farmers can be confident that they should yield well and have decent disease resistance, and which are also tested to meet the requirements of maltsters for protein content, consistency of grain size etc. As better varieties come along, they push older ones off the list - typically 2-3 varieties make up 70+% of the crop, the others can be used in niche situations such as particular heavy soils, or windy sites, or where a particular disease is a problem. It's reasonably unusual for a variety to stay on the list for much more than 10 years these days.
So if you buy a sack of generic pale malt, it will be made up of one or more varieties on the Recommended List, sometimes you may order "pale malt" and when the sack arrives it will say the name of a specific variety like "Planet" or "Laureate" etc, but sometimes not.
In general the varieties on the Recommended List are generally selected to work well for farmers and in the malthouse, but not necessarily for flavour - after all, they're what Carling is made from! So unless cash is really tight, it's not unreasonable to spend the extra couple of quid to buy GP or Otter.
Personally the majority of my beers are SMaSH-ish golden ales, so often the only malt I have in stock is a floor-malted Otter from the likes of Warminster or Fawcetts - makes inventory control much easier!
