What you said reminds me of what Vince Neil said once. Basically, he said that the grunge generation was all about "I hate my parents" and teen angst. He didn't understand the point of all that. He basically said that we know that life can suck, so let's go out, have fun, drink some beer, and have sex with some hotties.
Yeah, I remember that argument (though at the time, I was in my 20s, and got along fine with my parents)
Hair and Grunge both had their bad points (a fair amount of grunge musicians were smackheads). More than anything else, I preferred the darker, rougher musical sound of grunge, to the not so heavy, overly produced/polished sound of glam and hair bands. I remember seeing on occasion, a couple of regionally successful bands, that though they had a glam image, sounded pretty good live - they were pretty heavy sounding. Each band released an album (which we were looking forward to), that was downright disappointing. Everything was majorly toned down (with excessive amounts of vocal harmonies to boot), to the point where it seemed like it was a case of the producer being of the "Barry Manilow does heavy rock" school of music production. You could say that it was a case of the same situation The Who had - better sounding live than on record (they always sounded toned down on record), but this was worse. Basically, both bands' albums seemed to adopt the same formula that most glam and hair bands adopted, because it sold records. In the case of both of the bands (that I used to see play), they were active around the time Grunge exploded, so it was a case of "too late" for them.