I too have noticed that there is a growing trend to having as small a tank as possible. The worst case I have seen online was someone using a mason jar (about two cups worth of water) to keep as a "pico reef" with a few zoanthids and mushrooms in it to keep on his desk at work.
There are a lot of issues to overcome when setting up such a small tank, mainly proper filtration, skimming and lighting for the animals that people want to keep in there. It's well known that anemones and clams don't live very long/well under anything but extremely intense lighting (AKA MH) and excellent water quality. I know that some people have even put MH lighting over their nano reefs but I can't imagine how they can keep the temperature stable in such a small body of water when people with much larger tanks have a hard time keep a stable temperature in their tanks with similar lighting.
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What concerns me is that these tanks are marketed as a all in one solution, easy to setup easy to keep. How many folks (esp. the begining aquarist) are willing to put in the time and money involved in maintaining a reef tank in 6-24 gallons of water?
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I find that more and more people are more concerned about the "set it and forget it" mentality when it comes to everything in their lives that they tend to forget that these are live animals that we are holding captive. People are amazed when they realise how much work and knowledge has to go into this hobby to get anything worth while out of it.
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Why isn't the industry trend toward getting people started in a more appropriate sized reef tank such as a 40-60 gallon tank?
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Unfortunately, I feel that a lot of LFS's (not all) are trying to push these setups to get people into the hobby and when things start to go wrong then they push for the larger tanks, thus more money since people are buying two or three times before they get something they are comfortable with. They get more money if they can sell the same person two or three setups rather then just selling the one setup. Since this hobby has a large turn around rate (people rarely stay in it for more then 5 years.) the industry tries to get as much money out of everyone during that short time frame. People who buy a good system first don't contribute very much to the industries profit margins.