but alcohol gets pretty expensive and if you're on a low budget, hard alcohol is a very easy thing to cut from the "free for everyone" list. The whole point IS that "host is cheap". Or, rather, that the hosts are trying to have a cheap wedding. Which you may or may not agree with on principle, however, that is what is being discussed at the moment.

If you're having a small reception/whatever, then I think you should provide hard liquor for everyone. However if you're looking at any group consisting of more than 100 people drinking hard liquor (or less than that if they're drinking to excess), it's going to get really expensive really fast (here at least) unless you buy cheap liquor (imo, worse than making me pay for it!)

And I don't think she means that you only feed the wedding party at the reception. I think she means that the wedding party has dinner before/after the reception and NO ONE eats a meal at the reception (just small snacks and the like). Unless you have your reception over dinner time, I don't see any problem with that at all, particularly for large weddings.