As far as my personal invective, I find your very middle-class dismissive contempt for people who have worked and are still working in folk music far more insulting than anything I could come up with.

I'm not dismissing anything, Jim - just pointing out what it is. My whole life is steeped in the collected works of folklorists, be it The Brothers Grimm, Asbjorsen and Moe, Francis Child, Harry Smith, Steve Roud, Ronald Hutton and God knows who else. This isn't about pouring contempt, it's simply pointing out that Folk is Their Myth arising from the very artificial procedure of curating the feral artworks of the working-class. Most of us come to them through the collections, yet the collections don't represent The Tradition any more than the Ancient Egyptian archaeology on display at the British Museum represents the culture, times and experience of Ancient Egyptians. This is just basic pragmatics shot through with underlying prejudices and presumptions of The Revival; the sort of music we like mentality, which is absolutely fine & natural, unless you're telling me Folk is about something other than musical idiom, the diddle-de-dee and the Sean Nos - which is fine too, but hardly representative of the Musical Experience of the People of Ireland.

none of them acutually "say" anything to anybody and are as about as far from the tradition as you can possibly get

They do though, and in terms of the 1954 Definition you could term such music Folk if you so wished, because, Folk in that sense is not Idiomatic, but determined by other factors, such as community and character. What you you have there is a living, thriving functional tradition of communal music making every bit as vibrant as your precious songs ever were - maybe even more so given the dynamic of technology and communication factors that engender an even greater democratisation of musical experience than at any other time in human history.

And yet would there be a place for it in your Traditional Music Centre? By your response I guess not, because it doesn't fit in with folksy proscriptions about what Traditional Music ought to be rather than what it is.