Only one counterpoint here...
There's only so much shelf space and so many tap lines available.
5000 breweries can't ALL get on the shelves. No matter what ABI does. There's not enough room.
I mean, you look at San Diego, a county with 125 breweries. How are all those breweries going to get onto supermarket (or even liquor store) shelves? They're not.
And that's okay.
I spent the holiday weekend in Napa/Sonoma, and the wine industry is somewhat of a good example. There are >8,000 wineries in the US. The vast majority of the industry is controlled by the "big guys", but there's still enough room for 8,000 wineries. Do 7,000 of those wineries think they're going to be the next Mondavi? No, not really. They're small-scale operations producing maybe a few thousand cases of wine per year. And yet they succeed. I visited wineries I've never heard of before, and ended up bringing home a little over a case of assorted wine from my visits (and yes, a case of half Pliny and half Blind Pig
)
We as craft beer fans need to stop assuming that all of these breweries are being locked out of being "the next Ballast" or "the next Stone". There's only so much room for breweries to exist at that scale. But the US market will undoubtedly support more breweries than wineries, because as the market develops, the market will support it. Maybe not on every supermarket shelf, but little neighborhood breweries or decent-sized brewpub restaurants can easily exist all over the nation alongside ABI and The High End without ANY difficulty.
We should fight where we need to fight. We should fight any attempt by ABI to create laws which benefit them at the expense of the small brewers. We should fight for self-distribution rights that bypass three-tier for small breweries (as we have in CA, one of the few states w/o the three-tier system and independent breweries are thriving). We should fight for a robust independent brewing scene.
But let's not delude ourselves into thinking that every 500-bbl brewery has the capability to become a 5,000-bbl brewery if only ABI would get out of the way. That's not going to happen. What we should do is cheer those 500-bbl breweries and continue visiting them and enjoying their beers even if Wicked Weed gets nationwide distribution.