Alcoholism aside, why do you think that it's OK to judge someone based on what they do/don't want to drink? Some people make the conscious choice to not have alcohol. That's OK!
Disclosure; I graduated from Hack Reactor in October 2013.
The lack of negative reviews may seem strange, but I genuinely believe that everyone who has written about HR does so in a sincere manner (whether it be positive or negative). I can understand how it seems shady, but with a $17k tuition, a "free" hoodie is not enough to sway a review one way or the other.
A game I had helped develop made #1 a few weeks back. I wanted to comment on it and say thanks but ran into the same error message. Kind of strange that you have to request permission to comment, even if you have an account.
Seems like people fail to realize that the language is the medium through which they teach concepts (algorithms, data structures, etc).
I'm an HR06 grad; we focused on fullstack Javascript, but that hasn't stopped me from working in Ruby/Rails, or more recently, Go.
Beyond that, we did actually have lectures/sprints on MySql, Postgresql and Mongodb. Not sure if that's changed at all.