As certain as you are, as a professional mechanic more than half the time a customer comes in thinking they have a creaky bb, it is the pedals, the crank bolts, the chainring bolts, the rear skewer, or something else instead of the BB. BB noise is still moderately common though.

With threaded external BBs, they nearly never make noise unless the cups aren't greased and torqued into the frame adequately or the bearings are blown. When you remove the crank, how do the bearings feel? If they feel significantly rough they should be served or replaced.

On that Hope BB, the bearings are designed to be replaceable. https://www.hopetech.com/wp-content/...structions.pdf It's not clear if you need a bind bearing puller to remove the bearings.Some poking around reveals they are normal 2437 bearings. If you want to stay with ceramic this is still $60-100 to replace because ceramic bearings are stupidly expensive in addition to being mostly worthless. Normal steel bearings will cost you $10-15 each. If you remove your bearings you might try cleaning and repacking them, here are some instructions: https://www.bocabearings.com/general...ng-maintenance . I've done this with mixed results on normal steel bearings, haven't done so on ceramic yet.