I pretty much concur with what "Yuri Rage" said. I see a whole lot more preoccupation with the "extreme" beers here on HBT than any large amount of discussion on SNPA (or any other PA, for that matter). I enjoy SNPA, along with several other commercial PAs, and it's high enough quality and been around so long it might even be termed a benchmark for the style.
At this point I will wax somewhat discursive, as this thread is already tending in that direction. I will be heading into my fifth year of homebrewing this spring. My first three years were spent making batches that hardly ever repeated a recipe. I suppose I was searching for what I liked, everything from hefes and belgians through PAs, IPAs to porters, stouts and barleywine.
Opening on season five, my plans involve perhaps 80% repeating recipes that I know, like, and are enjoyed by both myself and Mrs. Rico. Only a few recipes each in Spring & Fall are devoted to experiments, and neither the beers that have established themselves as regulars nor any of my experiments this Spring are clones of commercial beers. In fact, the only clone I made on purpose (a year ago last Fall) that was spot on and I've really enjoyed is the Founders Breakfast Stout in the recipe section. I enjoy it, but so seldom (ad it stretches my equipment to the limit) that I probably won't brew it again. My strangest experience with a new commercial beer, SN's Ruthless Rye, is that it's very close to a recipe I found on HBT several years ago (Ed Wort's BCB Rye IPA) and brew year-round. But that doesn't really count, since I brew the BCB Rye IPA and have for some time, and the SN is similar to it- so no cloning was involved, in fact, for all I know it was the other way around.
To get back around the long way to the subject of this thread, it still remains true that "There ain't no 'countin for taste."