Ok ok, hold the phones.
Has this discussion happened already, or am I missing something? From my time here, I've discerned (and I'd venture to say that most others have, too) that Homebrewtalk's overarching narrative is highly supportive of aging beer. Hell, I get my homebrewing information from a number of different sources, and virtually all of them heavily advocate giving beer time to mature. My impression has been that this isn't a theory, but an accepted fact of brewing; I've always assumed that the big breweries can move faster due to some combination of equipment and batch size. Personally, I even noticed some significant positive changes in my first couple beers upon letting them age, and thus my modus operandi became to not even taste them until after aging.
But if that's not true, then why are the vast majority of us wasting our time? Is there a discussion to be had here, or is the aging theory really just some vestigial nonsense?
*Waits for Revvy's rebuttal*