Hell, I think the whole premise of this thread is ****ed up, I don't hear too many people talking **** about Sam Adams anyway.
It's like Step #5 on the True Path Of Beer Enlightenment (Snobbery)...
Step #1, of course, being the tasting of anything besides BMC and enjoying it.
Step #2, as we all know, is the self-education in why better-tasting beer actually tastes better and learning terms like "malt", "hops", and "marketing". Soon after this, one sometimes erroneously decides that BMC has NO flavor, and starts turning their nose up at it at gatherings.
Step #3 is the choosing of a "pet" craft brand to begin forcing on your unwilling BMC-drinking (and enjoying!) friends, regardless of their protests. This is followed very closely by Step #3b, which is to being harassing and poking fun at your BMC-drinking friends for still drinking the same BMC you were drinking with them like 2 years previously.
Step #4 is a somewhat juvenile development step that involves mocking BMC breweries and all their products because they "suck". Showing no regard for the precision with which a consistent product is cranked out year after year, it is summarily stated that all products from any BMC brewery must by definition suck, and at this stage, active "Attack Mode" is activated in the burgeoning Beer Snob.
Step #5, then, is when you've become SO cool and beer-savvy that you've earned the right to start bashing craft breweries. This is not something that can be done without the foreknowledge of many witless and obtuse references to aromas and flavors you couldn't pull from a beer if they had a handle and a strobe light attached, but of course you read it in a magazine so it must be there. To ease the transition to such an expert level of beer-ninja verbosity, an easy target must be picked, and as a very visible, large-scale, and not-quite-outstanding-enough-to-be-untouchable operation, Sam Adams fills the bill quite nicely, an unfortunate victim of its own success.
It's not until Step #9 that one usually realizes that bashing Sam Adams has been counterproductive all along, but by then, no one wants to drink with you anyway, so the epiphany is wasted.