I bristle at the suggestion that, given a couple more years, he could have produced something of the calibre of Digence, Tilston, McTell or Martyn. I wouldn't swap the 30 short minutes of Pink Moon for the entire combined discographies of them

Me neither, as it happens. I still listen to Nick Drake sometimes, and I don't even own anything by any of those four people, so I wasn't making a statement about the calibre of the albums. Just saying that if things had gone well for him, Nick Drake would have ended up as one of those performers - playing the same kind of venues, getting played on the same kind of radio programme, raved about by the same kind of people. He wanted to be much, much more - and he was prepared to do much, much less. (Of course, if things had gone well for Nick Drake, Pink Moon would probably never have been recorded.)