I'm just getting started in AG brewing (elec BIAB) but I've done a few batches with extract and from the outside looking in, making beer to me means turning starchy malt into sugary wort. If that's already been done for me, I'm really just re hydrating and infusing with hops, perhaps steeping some grains. All the variables during mashing were taken out of my hands, the fun has already been had. Boiling, hop additions, and of course fermentation aside, to me it's the difference between making coffee from beans vs. stirring some instant coffee into hot water. I'm not saying extract brews can't win awards, or that AG quality is somehow superior (my only AG batch to date was a band-aid laden nightmare) but just looking at processes, although both result in beer, one is a continuation of thousands of years of human tradition, the other is not.
This hobby (sport? obsession!) is called homebrewing by the way, not homesteeping, not homefermenting. Modern technology and sanitation practices may have stripped much complexity away, but the act of transforming grains into beer remains as an umbilicus; as evidence and reminder of our place in history.
If arriving at drinkable beer were the only goalpost, there would be another branch of homebrewing with ready-to-ferment wort provided in cans, self carbonating in its own pressure vessel, with all sorts of authentic recipes available to provide a tiny, easily-attainable soapbox from which to profess one's own superiority over the unwashed, BMC-swilling masses.
And those folks would almost certainly seek refuge from the ridicule of elitist extract brewers, in a thread much like this one.
