This hobby is just going to continue to get more elitist. It’s just simply not cool anymore to own GSP or a Kenya tree, you have to buy the most expensive acro that has the most extravagant name in order to have a “amazing” aquarium. Seeing these “sales” on Black Friday and cyber Monday are truly horrifying, the sellers jack up the prices and then advertise them as huge price reductions. Granted that’s in every market for Black Friday, but it hurts a little more when done in our hobby. Also the prices for corals are outrageous, an sps frag with 5 polyps should not be going for a thousand dollars, especially when it looks suspiciously like a 20 dollar acro.Well thanks to all those BRS video's every tank these days is started with all dry rock, all dry sand, and god forbid if something hitchhiked a ride in to the tank. "OMG WHAT IS THIS AND HOW DO I GET RID OF IT!!!!" we all know the threads of just common bristle worms, peanut worms, vermetid snails, etc. which is all part of owning a reef tank, and part of the beneficial life that makes up a reef tank. But everyone wants to get them out of their tank because "I don't like it, and I didn't put it in the tank". Owning a reef tank is not a sterile eviroment, and if it is, you have a dead tank!
So with all these sterile tanks being started up, whats the next trend going to be? No sand, no LR, just a bare glass box with water and biomedia in the sump? We already have many threads about negative aquascape and the lack of rock this creates.
Maybe I'm just old school, but I happen to like a tank packed with rock, and on those rocks are many well grown in colonies, not just a few rocks here and there with a hundred tiny frags on them. Tanks these days seem to be like an epenis for most. Very sterile tank with minimal rock, and 100 tiny frags glowing all sorts of weird colors cause all I run is a windex tank. No one ever lets these poor frags grow to colonies. God I remember when what is called a mini colony now, used to be a frag! I've had flem balls bigger then some of these so called frags!and it didn't cost me $500 for a booger.
OOh don't forget all the dino threads we see now, we'll be seeing more of them now too.
Anyways, whats everyones thoughts? Am I just too old school to embrace change? Or is the hobby headed in the wrong direction?