Hey, another Glasgow person on the forums - that's always good - I in fact studied at Glasgow Uni too (about 5 years ago though!).
Sounds like an excellent project...home brew you can blame on Uni...perfect.
I am also new the HB, only been doing it for about 6 months so far but love it and am addicted. Anyway, to answer your questions:
What are the main reasons people are drawn to brewing at home?
For me
1. Lack of choice/ quality/ varieties: beer in the supermarkets I find is often poor quality and just really caters to the mass market, there is a lack of quality and variety that I found irritating; I had become fed up of seeing/ drinking the same beers over and over again, and in all honestly, not enjoying it much anymore!
2. Cost: yes you can go to the lovely craft beer shops in the West end of Glasgow (or wherever) and pick from a lovely and wide range of excellent bottles of beer but you frequent those places too much and you soon find youll need to re-mortgage your house! So once I explored Home brewing and found out how cheap the ingredients were I was keen to give it a go.
3. Customisation: say you try a beer and like it but think maybe more/ less hops flavour (or whatever characteristic) would be good then you can go ahead and try and recreate it to suit your palette.
4. Making awesome beer for friends/ family, them enjoying it and you being able to say you made it yourself!
5. and more recently, a desire to recreate hard to get hold of beers. Take for example Pliny the Elder, I would love to taste it, however I dont expect to go to California anytime soon and thus a homebrew clone is probably the closest I will get for now.
Why some people are initially apprehensive to start?
Cost of equipment: In all honestly, before I really researched it I assumed starting off would be very expensive and this held me back from going for it. It was only once I found out that HB can really be as cheap, or expensive as you want that I decided to start theres a kit for everyones budget!
Complexity of process: I pretty much assumed that the process of making beer would be very complicated/ time consuming and Id need a degree in chemistry/ engineering to get something half decent following on from reading books and other resources I realised I was wrong it can be as complicated or easy as you want really and a better beer than what the supermarket offers is easily within reach.
Preconceptions: I spoke to my father in law about it when I was considering getting in to HB, he used to do it many years ago and had more than ones story about exploding bottles, blowouts during fermentation and not great tasting beer. This slightly put me off as I assumed that HB beer would never be anywhere near as good as beer you can buy in the pub/ off the shelf and the juice would not be worth the squeeze!
Space/ money/ time: My wife was convinced that HB would stink the house out, cost a small fortune and fill our house, so convincing here took a little while even after I was ready to jump in! That being said
our house is now full of homebrew stuff, so she was right about that!
Hope this helps!