Sorry if I introduced conflict there, but I too have played in rock bands, as it happens, and long enough to know that they have a different (neither better nor worse) approach to playing. I admire their prowess at soloing, use of killer riffs and use of chord extensions, etc, but as you say cowboy chords can often work just as well. However, I have always been aware of a little condescension by those with the ‘high end American guitars’ (your words) towards those of us who play acoustic instruments (before they became cool again in recent years) and those of us who play fingerstyle, as if both are really only for nerds.

This condescension also comes through in the guitar magazines, where articles regularly claiming to demystify fingerstyle playing, and helping you ‘find your inner folkie self’, are usually penned by experts on electric guitar playing, but who give the wrong impression that it’s no more than playing repetitive picking patterns, and actually not worth bothering with anyway, unless you want to play nursery rhymes and those twee folk songs you were made to sing at school. Ironically, if you work through the two solos in Sultans of Swing, often cited as the best rock solos of all time, you will find that much of it is standard fingerstyle and chord arpeggios anyway.