Just wanted to put this out there for discussion. I've been noticing a lot of "Short & Shoddy", 15 minute brews, 30 minute boil/mash, no boil, no chill, grain to glass in 7 days, raw ale, etc lately in home brewing and wondering what's going on with this rush to get the beer brewed, packaged in such a short span of time. I'm just as guilty of it myself and did a rye mild recently with 30 min mash & 30 minute boil after listening to an Experimental Brewing Podcast.
You've got a lot of different things there, no-chill actually stretches the brewday into a second day for instance, even if it's less "handson" time. I think it's a few things :
The move to hop-forward NEIPA-type beers in the last 5 years - the commercial world is obsessing about drinking NEIPAs as quickly as possible, so it's natural that homebrewers are following suit. If the beers are all about fragile ephemeral volatiles, then preserving them means short grain-to-glass times (although the brewing itself may be more rigorous than other beers because you're worrying more about oxidation etc)
The move from brewing being handed down in tablets of stone from the Gospels of St Palmer and St Wheeler to a more "bottom up" culture where people learn from blogs and forums. Even people who don't buy into everything that eg Brulosophy or Experimental Brewing do, now have a more sceptical take on the received wisdom, they're more likely to try something new - and if it works well, there's a willing audience on the internet who will adopt it.
I think the big improvements in malt happened earlier, although dry yeasts and the availability of wild bugs have definitely improved; but technology does play a part. Partly in the availability of high tech to a few people, such as the DNA analysis in the big Treehouse thread here. It's the sort of thing that would take a few $k to set up the lab, but if you're working in a lab then the marginal costs are minimal, and even if the sequencing can't be done by anyone it can come out with some simple suggestions like "this brewery is using yeasts X and Y" which can be implemented by anyone. Or one person with a Tilt can see that yeasts X and Y take 5 days but Z takes 3 days, or another yeast tends to stall after 3 days and so with the appropriate prodding at the right time can be made to ferment in 6 days rather than the 12 days it takes without prodding.
Aside from the high-tech kit generating knowledge that gets into the public domain for use by everybody, you also have low-tech kit getting into the hands of ordinary Joe. Inkbirds for instance, mean that ordinary Joe can have far better control of fermentation temperatures, which in turn means he can cut a few corners elsewhere without compromising the overall beer. Same with water company reports being freely available on the internet, which give a massive leg-up on the water front, along with cheap RO water and RO units.
Finally, I think you've got to be a bit careful of equating noise on the forums to actual activity. Everyone knows how to brew a 4% English bitter, whereas people are still figuring out how to brew NEIPAs - so that's what the traffic is about. There's lots of people out there quietly brewing extract kits that just work, and they'd think it would be a bit weird to be talking about their brewing on a bulletin board. So you don't hear from them.
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