Well you guys are doing it wrong then...My homebrew comes out consistantly better then commerical beer IMHO. (to those of you advocating homebrew is inferior to commercial beer, sounding like InBev reps on the Board!)
SOME homebrew (even a lot) IS inferior to any commercial brew out there - even Black Label or Old Milwaukee Light. I know - I was given some and it was - truthfully - undrinkable. It wasn't infected, it didn't have any kind of DMS or acetaldehyde or anything like that. It just tasted like the run-off from a pig sty. Like they brewed it with old bar-sink water.
Some homebrew (even a lot) is far superior to commercial products. If you are referring to BMC offerings, anything with a little flavor is going to taste superior to that. If you're talking about the big boys in the craft beer industry - Sierra Nevada, New Belgium, Widmer, etc. - that ups the ante significantly, because those folks brew some
great beers.
AFA cloning goes, if you want to really test your brewing chops, imitating an already successful recipe - and making it so well that people can't tell the difference side by side - is a good way to do it. I have personally never done a clone, and might not ever do one. But I
can see that there is value in the exercise. I can guarantee that some of the best commercial craft beers out there started out life as a clone recipe, and were then tweaked and evolved to become something original. Hell, anyone that brews a Wit can trace that line back to Hoegaarden. That was an extinct style until that brewery revived it.
Another aspect to cloning is that if you can make a precise copy of a very successful beer, then the chances are that your process (albeit on a smaller scale) is very close to what the original brewery is doing. If that's a successful brewery, it probably means that you are doing something right, too.
I may miss the marks for the style guidelines in some cases, but I don't care if I like the result! I"d make a terrible commerical brewer but I"m a decent homebrewer.
Yooper...some of the best commercial craft beer I've had doesn't
really fit the style. I love Sweetwater's Georgia Brown. But it's a hoppy brown, and likely too heavy on the IBUs to fit style (11C). But they sell the crap out of it. DFH's Midas touch doesn't fit any style that exists, but it's also one of the most complex and delicious brews I have had in awhile. Being able to brew to style is great and all, but in the end it's the flavor that's going to sell, whether it's to style or not. You probably know a lot more examples than I do of that.