What I want played at my funeral is Bartok's Second Violin Sonata, which somebody I know not who said was the greatest work in the entire literature of music and they weren't far wrong.

This isn't fair:

he would have been interested in their musical value, rather than their ethnographic areas

for two reasons - firstly, he was a first-rate scholar and knew how important it was to document everything he could possibly find out about what he was recording (we know who all of his singers were, and quite a lot about their lives). Secondly, he wasn't behaving like a beekeeper emptying a hive, he cared about the people who created the music, and knew that preserving the music was an act of celebration of its creators. (If there was ever any folksong collector who simply treated their sources as bins in a record shop, I can't think who it might have been - it's a line of work that only appeals to people who are interested in and empathetic with their fellow human beings).