I love to cook. Some of my favorite recipes require multiple days or weeks of prep, hours and hours of slow cooking or smoking over hardwood, etc.
But, I don't cook like that every night. Some nights, I make quick meals. I **gasp** own a microwave. Some nights, I even let someone else cook for me and get takeout or go to a restaurant.
Doesn't mean I'm not a cook.
Doesn't mean I don't enjoy cooking as a hobby.
Doesn't mean that I can't go all out on some weekends and REALLY cook.
Sometimes you raise and butcher your own hog, cure the belly, slowly smoke it and use your homemade bacon in baked beans, cooked for 24 hours in a slow cooker.
Sometimes you buy bacon and the rest stays the same.
And, sometimes, you crack open a can of Bush's and enjoy time with your friends.
Unless you are raising your own grain, malting it yourself, forging your own steel and building your own equipment, and brewing over a fire you made from wood you chopped down yourself (using your own hand-made axe), to be bottled in bottles you made by blowing glass yourself, you're cutting corners.
One last analogy. In the 50's, Betty Crocker released cake mixes that you just added water to. Home cooks complained that the didn't feel like they were really baking when they used those mixes. So, they removed the fats and powdered eggs and introduced cake mixes where you add oil, water and eggs. Suddenly, everyone felt that they were doing "enough" that they could tell people they "baked a cake" and not feel like they were lying.
Do we have to go through crap like that in homebrewing to earn our membership cards in the club?
PS - I bought one to be delivered in March. It will go in the 4th bedroom of my house, which has been entirely converted over to my brewery, alongside all of my all-grain equipment, which I will continue to use, *in addition* to this new machine.