re: What makes cheap beer taste bad?

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substituted cheaper hop pellets for fresh hops.

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There may be some fallacies to this statement.

Beer nerdery engaged

1) Fresh hops are only used by some craft breweries, and are only made in the fall at harvest time. Fresh hops or wet hops, spoil extremely quickly, so they must use them within a day or 2 of picking, otherwise they must be dried out.
2) Pelletizing hops takes the dried hops, and grinds them down into pellet form. It maintains the lupulin oils within the hops and concentrates the hops. Hop pellets are used in majority of breweries nowadays. Whole leaf, while still used, takes up more wort utilization compared with pellets, and gets you a lower yield of what goes in the bottle.

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Schlitz also shortened the aging process, which required an additive to reduce haze that normal aging would have prevented.

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Again, there may be some senationalism to this statement. Additives to reduce haze, is not unheard of and is common, depending on style and brewery. I don't know of any haze reducing additives that leaves sediment to beer. If you have sediment in your beer, that is the yeast dropping out of suspension. Which i guess, is caused by clarifying agents, but also occurs naturally with non-filtered beer.