Some are thrilled. When I grow most ale strains up on plates I just throw them into a 30C incubator to get them grown up faster. I'll incubate at the low end of their growth range if I'm trying to separate yeast from some other bug.
I think that the main issue at play is that your average home brewer doesn't have a good grip on yeast biology, and all have varying goals for their beers. The advice given then has to be as broad and simple as possible. Telling people to direct pitch one vial of fresh WLP into 5 gallons of 1.050 wort is exactly that.
That advice though sucks for certain goals just the same as the advice that homebrewers who say to use .75-1 million cells/ml/plato sucks for specific goals.
The one thing I will say is that I highly prefer pitching starters that are at high krausen to pitching vials, smack packs, dry yeast, or cold crashed starters. They take off faster and just seem to give better results.
EDIT: and as a background, I don't buy yeast generally, I build up from plates or from top-cropped yeast depending on what is convenient.
I definitely agree with you. especially happy to hear your comment on pitching starters at high krausen - this has been my best strategy as well and the one that makes most sense.
I do agree that yeast biology is not well understood. Not just by average home brewer - I think there's a lot of mystery even to guys like Chris White. Just too much variance and too many parameters to control.
However, while I am not Chris White and I don't speak for him but I will try offer my best theory of the original comments that started this thread:
Look at history of home brewing. 10, 20 years ago yeast and brewing was even more of a mystery, and a lot of people under-pitched old, barely-viable yeast, and while they made beer, sometimes even great beer, beer taste suffered tremendously as a result.
So homebrewers got all wise or paranoid even about proper yeast count and starters and all that. In fact, the advanced homebrewers got anal about yeast count, and super-anal about starter procedure.
But now fast-forward to 2015 when we have much cleaner, healthier strains, and globalization provides for faster, cheaper shipping, home-brew market expands tremendously and so you can get a vial of fresh yeast for about $7 at most LHBS, right now. But is it possible that the homebrewing is still stuck in 1990ies mentality?
Setting aside "big" bears (>1.065 or so), getting exact cell count and having a starter of "just" the "right" size, down to 5% margins, may be an overkill now.
It may be heresy to argue this here, but what if you could pitch a single, recently purchased vial into your wort and get identical (as far as blind taste are concerned) results to complex series of harvesting yeast, making starters etc.
Worse, for newbie brewers, making the starter is another tedious, time-involved step full of complex instructions, making things needlessly complicated and raising the entry barrier, and it could produce bad results, or worse, an infection.
Don't get me wrong - I DO harvest my own yeast, I have 6 or so vials and about the same amount of mason jars in my fridge right now, and I am about to do it again on the new yeast from a batch that is fermenting now, but I often wonder why I do it - is it really just to save $6.99? Is it just to prove that I am an "expert" of some sort? Why?
Is my yeast going to be cleaner than what pros can produce? Probably no.
Is saving $7 per batch going to make me so much richer by the end of the year? No.
Mostly it's experimentation and learning and trying things, but if in the process I am compromising my beer, why do it?
I have to admit, while there are historic reasons for why we all are still doing this and perhaps some macho thing about going through the entire process without getting it wrong in some dramatic fashion (look at "does this look infected to you?" threads), but in the end I wonder if this is all a major overkill, and maybe this is what Chris White is trying to communicate.
I am sorry but making and growing a starter (way ahead of time), monitoring progress, swirling/stirplating, cold crashing, properly decanting, storing, feeding etc. - is a major enterprise. It's almost as involved as making extract beer, just at smaller scale.
If Chris White tells me I can pay $7 to skip this entire sequence of steps that only introduces more risk to my yeast pitching process, I am IN! Hell, if I am brewing a big beer and I can buy two vials of high quality yeast for $14 and know that this saves me a week of growing the starter and worrying about the infection, I am still in. It's still a great deal! How much is your time and effort worth? What if I told you that your imperfect starter practice gives you 10% chance of infection vs. using the vial gives you only 1% of infection. The numbers are made up but are you rationally making the decision to harvest and propagate and make your own yeast, vs. well, just spending $6.99 or wherever it cost.
I suspect that perhaps in 10 years or so the whole "harvest your own yeast" and "start your starter" culture will be diminished to the margins. Most people will talk about huge variety of yeast strains and grains, but not about some complicated procedures that will save you a few bucks but will do nothing for your beer.