I guess I will stir the pot.
I have a number of issues with the AHA.
1. The heavy focus by the AHA on the shows. The Hereford cattle being produced for and winning the shows have little practical use in the commercial cattle industry. They are white muscled toads. Most of them are produced via ET and there is almost no way to tell if their dams can have and raise a calf, or breed back regularly, because the dams have been in a donor pen since they were heifers. There is little interest from this sector in important economic traits for the commercial cattle industry, like longevity, or doability in rangelike conditions, a trait the Hereford breed was once famous for possessing.
2. EPDs are the "cash cow" of the breed associations and are probably the biggest sham ever foisted on the cattle industry. They took a good tool (in-herd production/performance records) and turned it into a farce in the effort to quantify results across an entire breed and even multiple breeds. Even with the so called "genetic enhancement", EPD accuracies on young virgin bulls is about .3 or lower. Before you buy that next young bull based on his EPDs, I urge you to look into things like the EPD's accuracy and the STANDARD DEVIATION at that accuracy for those EPDs you are looking at. It is eye opening once you understand it. But you won't see the breed associations freely putting that information out there. And most breeders won't publish EPD accuracy numbers in those slick catalogs they put out for their upcoming sale.
3. Breed integrity. The primary purpose of a breed association should be to preserve the integrity of the breed by insuring that the registrations and resulting pedigrees produced are accurate. The AHA has failed miserably in that regard. The Hereford Herdbook was supposed to be closed for well over a century, yet the breed has been significantly contaminated with the blood of other breeds since the mid 70s. It was the Simmental that brought the diluter gene disorder into the breed. Now, the quest for goggle eyes, red necks, and "red to the hoof" legs have prompted many breeders to use bulls who display very little Hereford breed character and whose genetic makeup is questionable, IMO. It is probably only a few years until the trademark "white face" will be completely gone from many "registered Herefords". The AHA seems to have no interest in particpating OR even making data available to anyone that is interested in doing DNA research regarding breed identification and purity. Probably because they are all too aware of all the snakes in the genetic woodpile.
I could write a book(or at least a long chapter) about each of these issues that I have. But I will step aside on the soapbox and welcome comments from others now.