My personal taste complaint with a lot of people who open a brewery... Everyone seems to think that more hops = better beer. There are so many other possible flavors and types to a beer than some type of IPA that is absolutely overloaded with hops. But that seems to be a very common type of thing to brew. When I open something and am assaulted with the aroma of hops, it's not appealing anymore. It was interesting 7-8…
You've got it right. It's not that more hops = better beer. It's that more hops = easier beer. Malt-forward beers are much more difficult to get right, and require a lot of very careful attention to detail. Hops are easy: Just throw them into the batch and set a timer. Their strong flavor is also useful for masking a lot of consistency problems and off-flavors that might stem from other, trickier parts of the brew process.
The brewmaster of a new craft brewery is likely an amateur who recently went pro, and has very little practice brewing at an industrial scale. It's an over-crowded market right now, too, so they're operating on very tight margins and working with a clientele that can afford to be very picky. The days when one could get away with marketing something like Shiner Bock as a bock are long gone. So they can't afford to burn a lot of money working out why a recipe that yielded a perfect malt aroma at a 5 gallon batch size comes out flat and lifeless when scaled up to 30 barrels. They'd be out of business before they got it pinned down. Hops are easy, though, so the hoppy beer brewer is more likely to survive.
I suspect that this effect continues on to packaging and distribution: Hoppy beers can handle some amount of oxidation where cream ales and lagers quickly start to taste like cardboard. That's useful in an overcrowded market where your beer might spend a few months sitting on a shelf before anyone drinks it. (Hopefully this becomes less of a thing as cans, which have a longer shelf life than bottles, increase in popularity.) And there's no way that your local TGI Bennihan's or the "537 beers on tap" bar is staying on top of cleaning their tap lines, but, again, hops can help mask the funk.
It's also something of an open secret among beer judges that hoppy beers are at an unfair advantage to win the "best in show" prize. Because the final selection for that prize comes at the end of the day, after the judges' palates have been deadened by endless beer tasting, and hops are about the only flavor component that is as subjectively noticeable at the end of the show as it was in the morning. Any amateur brewer who's involved in the beer competition circuit is going to be influenced by that.