Bummer. The sad part is that breweries like that end up out of business and do more damage than good to the industry.
Hopefully no one misunderstands my comments. I'm not saying that great tasting skills is a bad thing. In fact I've learned a lot from great judges and plan to continue that. I'm merely saying that no matter what a beer judge god thinks, I still have to like it myself. I'm never going to be someone who just takes one guy's word for it.
However, when you walk into a bottle shop and are looking at THE WALL OF CRAFT BEER it can be pretty overwhelming. and if you are a neophyte and get overwhelmed you will grab... whatever is familiar. either BMC or, if you're committed to trying 'craft', something you've seen an ad for like blue moon.
I have a hard time buying wine because I really like good wine but when I walk into a wine store I don't even recognize 90%+ of the labels I see and the ones I do recognize are the big names. I can buy a bottle of ravenswood zin and know that it'll be okay but I won't discover anything new. I can randomly buy the bottle with the cutest critter on the label and I might get lucky but probably not. I can narrow my choices by going to the organic/sustainable/biodynamic section but it's still the same problem, just narrowed down. Or I can read the little Wine advocate blurbs and try to match the 'experts' evaluation to my desires.
Whether you like it or not the craft beer industry is maturing into something like the wine industry with a very very wide field of players and having some basis for comparison is helpful.
That said, if you drink a beer and it's tastes like blech and eeeeew you shouldn't let a gold medal make you question your own experience.