I'll take it from your evasively obscure answer that I didn't get it wrong - so you have your response.

In answer to "Does it need to be sung in some "traditional" manner...." you say No - style or setting has nothing to do with it's 'folkness'. We'll take the Folk Process as read when it comes to Heavy Metal covers of traditional songs, otherwise Heavy Metal is a traditional music. I love going into the Liverpool & Manchester music shops of weekend and listening to kids thrashing out power-chords with great gusto and no little skill, acquiring their chops as part of a venerable idiom that has endured down the ages - certainly from before their time anyway. Don't get too hung up on the songs - the idiom is the key to traditional process; the conventions by which such things are composed and absorbed into the community which in no way contradicts the tenets of the 1954 Definition which, as I've said elsewhere, still has a lot to tell us about the nature of music as a whole.

Fitting your particularly square peg into a round hole - no symbolism intended!

My interest in folk is founded purely on a lifelong love of traditional English-speaking folk song, but even in the most traditional of folk clubs we do not experience the glories of traditional song, rather a distant echo of them - we engage in a seance, becoming mediums to a potency that might still invigorate. In this sense you are right - I am a square-peg lover of Traditional Song who has been vainly trying to fit in with round-hole general Folkery. I do not decry it (as you do) even though I've tried & failed in my appreciation of it. It's fun on a good night with lots of beer & fags, but no one can smoke any more & I'm not allowed more than a pint or two - and, sadly, I can't take Round Hole Folk entirely sober. Otherwise, life really is too short.   

Not if they try to pass off your rag-bag as folk, they don't.

This is the nature of Round Hole Folk though, old man; it begins with the likes of Ewan MacColl trying to write traditional-sounding songs & encouraging others to do likewise. To round-hole folkies this is all very well - it thrives & people have a lot of fun doing it. In this sense Folk Music is simply amateur music, variously skilled, open to all to do pretty much what they want. It is what a few people do after a long working day, to gather with a few pints and sing a few songs, acoustically, informally, by way of catharsis and recreation.

Square-Peg O'Piobaireachd