To me dance music is and probably always has been seperated into categories of what people percieve to be 'intelligent' forms, and those that are 'simple'. Progressive music, techno and breaks are percieved to at the most 'intelligent' end of the scale. For most people, i think trance comes somewhere in the middle (i think this is total bollocks), then further down the scale you have the 'harder' forms - hard house, hard trance and hardstyle. Some people will jump on something that sounds fresh, like hardstyle, before suddenly jumping off it when they realise its 'percieved' as being less intelligent.

I wouldn't deny hardstyle has lower production values than say techno. But since when has jumping up and down on a dancefloor like a monkey been about intelligence.