Disclosure: I'm a part-owner of a craft brewery and distillery which is guilty of some of these sins (and not so much of others). Happy to try to answer any questions about the industry.
Some breweries don’t seem to know how to make anything other than IPA.
Craft breweries have a problem that they have costs which don't scale in the same way as large breweries, so they need to produce a product that's differentiated and which they can charge a premium price for. In practice, this means they need to chase what beer fans are really valuing, which has been very hoppy beers for a few years -- it's both different from what you can get from mass-market brewers, allows some differentiation among beers from different craft breweries, creates a product which benefits from freshness and locality, and allows a higher price point. The brewers know how to make a variety of products, but they're responding to market demand. Less-hoppy beers just don't sell as well in the kind of craft rotator bars, etc., that sell this beer at these prices and which are addressable by the distribution and sales channels available to small craft breweries.
A growing and vibrant alternative is sours, which share some of the value and differentiation character of hoppy beers.
don’t get me started on craft whiskey distillers that sell a 2-year-old single “small barrel” bourbon for 2 to 3 times the price of a bottle of Wild Turkey 101
I hate this too, but again, it's the economics. Starting a business and paying a lot of money to buy equipment and rent space in the kind of locale which supports a local craft distillery, then pay for grain and barrels, then waiting 4+ years for product to be available is just not economically viable. The three options for getting product faster so you can get some money coming in are to do fast-aging in small barrels (crappy product), buy aged whiskey from someone else and put your label on it (deceptive to customers, but very common), or build a business around unaged product like gin (honorable, but not the biggest opportunity for craft spirits). We chose not to go this path: our only whiskey is bottled in bond (fermented, distilled and aged for 4 years on-site in full-size barrels), but it was only possible because of beer revenue.
Isn't it cheaper, faster, easier to produce ales than lagers? That must factor into it.
This is an element: ales can ferment for a week or so, lagers and pilsners can take three. It's very common for fermenting capacity to be the bottleneck for craft breweries, so this is a direct constraint on volume, and thus revenue. And when IPAs are able to demand a higher price than a great craft lager, and are more differentiated from mass-market product, you can see how the market influence results in this. (That said, we're very proud of our pilsner.)
