My experience too - playing with, and studying and learning the styles and techniques of others, and also playing different types of music, not just folk.

I learned my performing skills as a young man, playing in pop bands around the WMCs and Miners' Welfare clubs of Lincs/Notts/Yorks/Leics/Lancs in the late '60s and 70s. You had to be highly professional and put on a top-class show in many of those places, if you didn't come up to the expected standard you were told in no uncertain terms, and had money docked (sometimes all of it!).

By the time I came to folk clubs in the late '80s, I knew all about how to perform a song, how to sell it to the audience, the importance of eye-contact, how to introduce songs etc.