Here's my take on it. There are a few different reasons.
Anonymity and audience
It's an Internet forum. With total anonymity and a large audience, it's really easy for people to turn into assholes and type things they would never say to anyone face to face. You can see the same behavior from people on forums everywhere, on any website that allows public commenting on content. And it's really easy to fall into it yourself and participate, respond, retaliate. It's so easy to just type away without any consequences
Size of the sport
As small as this niche sport is, there sure are a lot of builders that came out of nowhere in the past few years. Some have turned out great. Some have disappeared. Some have screwed people out of their money. That makes posters on this forum (and others) very suspicious of any new builder (and probably for good reason)
The best is whatever I spent my money on
Hulls are expensive. People are choosy with what they spend their hard-earned money on. A lot of thought process may have gone into it. And because hull builders are pretty small operations in most cases, the customer gets a lot of personal interaction directly with the builder. That builds a pretty good bond between customer and builder. That, in turn, causes some people to act like jackasses towards other builders with hulls they perceive as "less than what I bought". It also causes those customers to display a lot of loyalty to their builder in threads where that builder or hull gets criticized. Maybe they get so pissed off that they will seek out other hull threads and chit on them just because.
Splashing
There's only so many different ways a hull can look. People are quick to call new builders out on splashing other products. Sometimes it's justified and sometimes it's not. But you know it's a problem and happens all the time, everyone from the little guy to the big guys may be doing it. When you're showing off your newly made footholds that you made and they have a competitor's logo imprinted in them, that's pretty bold. The practice is rampant and people love calling that out.
Testing, LOL what's that?
It's happened more than once that some new builder has come out with parts, or worse, hulls that are just 'designed' by looking at other stuff and without any testing at all or very little. And because the level of builder can vary so widely between garage hack and pro, some people are leary of that. So they ask and maybe they're not nice about it because they're jaded or because they're assholes. The new builder or perhaps their cheerleaders will get upset. You know what happens.
Builders
In a lot of cases, the hull builders themselves are not a company but rather a garage operation. This isn't a comment on anyone's skills to build a hull or run a business out of their garage. But those circumstances can make it easy to slip up with quality and/or customer service. Another thing that happens is these hull builders will be regular forum members who grew into the hull builder position. When anyone hates on the builder on the forum, that builder then acts like a 'normal' forum member when he should be acting like a business. Yes, there is a lot of hating on hull builders, but there is a just about equal amount of hating by hull builders. It doesn't impress me at all to see someone who solicits thousands of dollars from potential customers act like a kindergarten kid with a grudge against another kid.
I think it's pretty easy to tell when an up and coming vendor in this sport grows up into a real business that wants to get taken seriously: They pretty much stop posting on forums. There's nothing but hate and it's hard to see that and not respond. Ever wonder why the big players don't post at all or very very little?
