"I am in no position to generalise about folk clubs / singarounds / any-other-name"

Nor am I, my own comments are merely representative of my own limited experience. And actually, I think I've misunderstood SO'P in any event. I thought he was just talking about the strictly amateur song/music session, but in retrospect he's obviously describing those folk clubs of his own experience in general.

Maybe with me not being a child of the revival, I see things in far more black and white terms? Traditional songs and contemporary folk songs. Amateur music club and professional paid performer. I must confess I prefer to eschew the ambiguous shades of grey that I read hear and that appear to cause so much argument amongst people. It's super that people write new songs in the 'folk idiom' and rightly enjoy doing that, but it's the archived body of traditional material that interests me not new songs absorbed into 'the tradition'. Whatever that means, they are not identical to the archived body of songs from the old oral tradition. Similarly, if I pay to go see something I want to know what I'm paying to see. But if I'm simply joining in with a bunch of others just doing their thing, I'm joining in for the hell of it, and I'm not going to complain if I don't dig exactly what they're doing. If I go to a restaurant for a meal, I choose what I want and pay for it and if it's dire I get my money back and leave. If I go to a dinner party hosted by friends, I eat what I'm given and enjoy it in the spirit that it is given.

Perhaps if I was older and had been a part of the revival, the apparent ambiguities that I read here, would make more sense to me?