I’ll be the outlier and say that I find SNPA to be a mediocre beer. I’ve had many better Pale Ales. Forget the BJCP or competitions, but I’ll take a Dale’s or a Yard’s over a Sierra Nevada any day, to name just a few off the top of my head. I’ll acknowledge that maybe I’m not getting SNPA at its best, but it always comes across as too sweet and very unsessionable to me. Pass.
I'm not the world's biggest fan of SNPA myself but this is a good example of why beers with higher gravity, hopping, etc. win medals in competition. If you look at Dale's it's 6.5% ABV and 65 IBUs, which is well within IPA territory, especially for when it came out. Is it really an APA because they call it one? If not, after twenty years, how much can anybody be expected to care?
---
More broadly to the discussion: We're asking a lot from judges, who might spend five minutes max on a beer, to strike entries because they taste too good or seem a little over the top for the style. Guidelines nor competition rules set hard limits on gravity or hopping rate. Competitions don't require seeing the recipe beforehand and even if they did, it wouldn't objectively prove anything. A brewer with a dialed in process on a twenty gallon system can brew with better hop utilization than a new brewer with a stove top partial mash. The new brewer might use way more hops but that doesn't mean that beer necessarily has the best or most hop flavor.
Letting judges come up with their own hard limits is going to create chaotic results and discourage a lot of good brewers. I've seen judges try to do this and I've only ever seen it turn into a ridiculous discussion. It was obvious in short time in every instance that the judge only cared about showing how smart or superior his palate. If anything, we need a lot less of those judging experiences. I agree judges probably should strike entries obviously beyond the guidelines but striking close calls is probably not in the competition's best interests.