Sadfield
Landlord.
I am bit of a yeast fiend to the point I tend to phone any local brewery big or small to try and blag some yeast. Most of the more established ones are happy to share yeast but the 3 newish micros in my area all said they mainly use SO4 or SO5. Two fellow brewers did the Bermondsey mile before Christmas, I could not make it, all brewery's on the mile are known as craft brewers. As brewers they made a point of asking questions and I believe 4 of the brewery's said SO4 or SO5 the others they got no answer.
I was at the London and south east competition last month, ironically at one of the Bermonsey brewery's and had a great talk with one of the judges about hoppy beers and he was of the same opinion about the majority of new brewery's going by his own experience of judging around the country.
Apples and Oranges up here in the North West, with the brewers at Buxton, Cloudwater, Thornbridge and Marble all being linked in some way (mainly having all worked at Marble) there is probably more of a mindset as to not brewing generic beer with S04/US05. Cloudwater certainly don't (currently WLP4000 and JW Lees, printed on the cans), and from this article from James Kemp (head brewer at Marble) the others don't either. Nor my local brewery RedWillow who have their own house strain. I know these previously mention brewers are all really helpful to the other local breweries, and even to us homebrewers, so maybe they all push each other along to not brew generic beer with dry yeast. In Manchester there are also brewers like Chorlton who use wild yeasts and those harvested from vintage bottles of Berlinerweisse. I can understand new startups doing it to begin with as cash flow is a big issue. Get beer out of the door then worry about setting up to manage live yeast. Although, if your bench mark is Kernel who do a good job with US05, maybe that doesn't happen.