Definitely. There is certainly a point of utter inaccuracy or absurdity, where the name has little to nothing to do with what most people will generally conceive of what a certain name represents. Like, oh, say Cranberry Lambic.
It's all about context, in my opinion. Yes, there are good reasons. If you're looking for objective evaluation, or you're running a competition, there are enormously good reasons to define things pretty firmly. But even then, it's important to realize that there will always be a degree of arbitrariness, such as very fine subdivisions of popular styles so as to avoid having one category have 200 entries instead of a more typical 50 (to make numbers up).
I do think that beer makers, home or commercial, should find names that are in the right neighborhood of what they made. I'd be dismayed if I bought something labeled hefeweizen and got a copper-colored hop bomb that smacked me upside the head with centennials, even if the beer was brewed with wheat and was bottle conditioned. But if someone gave me something they called a bitter and it tasted to me more like a pale ale? Eh. Those two are so close together that there's no good dividing line. And that occurs with a lot of the style categories that are out there.
I think you've come up with an excellent example of where context becomes really important. If someone did go out of their way to point out that their beer was an English IPA, and that's what I got, I might be a little disappointed. If someone just gave me an IPA, and I found it to be one or the other, frankly, that's fine with me. Unless I were judging or something like that. Then the distinction matters more.
When I say just brew what's good, don't worry too much about what style it fits, I'm talking in the context of everyday drinking, when you just want to enjoy a good product. And I think in most cases, that's what people are looking for commercially as well. Give me a name that gives me a reasonably good expectation of what I'm going to get, and I'll decide from there whether I like it or not. The real fine-tuned distinctions, and the honest-to-god discussions I've heard from people who will say "well, it tastes fine but I don't like it because it's not really a proper ____" frankly gets in the way of simply appreciating a well-crafted beer.
Totally agreed. The devil's in the details of how precise one needs to get to achieve that.
And I agree with that. Where I differ not necessarily with you, but with those I've run into who think that these distinctions should apply in all circumstances, is that it's necessary to define and evaluate things that precisely all the time. I went through a stage of that when I first started exploring good beer and when I started brewing my own. I don't know if it's because I stopped brewing, or other factors, but most of the time now, I just want to enjoy a good beer. And as long as you're not steering me wrong by giving me something dramatically different than what the label says, as long as you're giving me a good beer, I'll be happy.
-Steve