There are a lot of issues, why shanties been forgotten in the first place at the end of the XIX, century. The revival in Grand Halls just confirmed misunderstanding shanties and forebitters.
Probably the biggest issue from mentioned time till now is that people still think music in terms of correction of notes is the really important thing in shanties. I think these things: music (i.e. melody or notes correction), and lyrics as well, are really think what nobody much cares about it, on the ship. Shantymen and shanties had a completely different role, the rough catching melody, and chorus were enough to do the role, namely, gives much better team effort in work.

So I list here those things, that can help understand the case, from my point of view:

1. Lyrics - important somehow for shantyman to carry over singing during the job. Sometimes it was hours, maybe days, depend on for example how leaky the ship it was, so to have tones of different "versions" of one song could help, especially when the crew doesn't know many melodies, this kind of using "versions" gives us great robustness. But lyrics were completely not important for the gang, of course, bawdy verses can cheer up devastated crew, theme or "version", can involve more sailor mentally into, so he can forget sometimes about his rough life which was good for him. But nobody cares about, unified version, which is significant or valuable from any research or academic point of view.

2. Tempo - the most important factor of any shanty, tempo gives preset for readiness for work, work pulses were the only way to move work forward better, and save power as well for next work. Here the center of shanty sense of existence happens. To singing shanty really authentically mean how close we can be to recreate those work pulses. If to achieve this ultimate goal we have to sacrifice melody, music notes, that's fine.

3. Melody - or music notes, important only to moment when sailors and shantyman can remember the rough pattern of melody. If the note goes up or down, or they sometimes not in point, or brother of Stan Hugill type it not exact? It doesn't matter, in the list of priorities they even not on the list of most important things.

4. Work - in this point I want to state is that in my opinion, shanty wasn't the most important thing to do jobs on the ship. Shanty it was just a helper, the significant helper but only helper. The shanties helped not only physically, I think help mentally as well.

5. Pronunciation or dialect - I think, all shanties in foreign Languages are especially exposed to extinction. My tryouts and also Gibb Sahib tryouts, to recreate those versions are really important, and mistakes in pronunciation are don't matter much, as long as we try to do everything to be close as possible for us, to the original pronunciation.

6. Recreation - This is my ultimate aim, to recreate all songs from Stan Hugill's "Shanties From the Seven Seas", and because it is His book, and his story, I take his approach versions, comments, and point of view. I do not judge him, I do not glorifying him or underestimate him. The process of my work is to: take a song, write lyrics for learning, write music notes from books, make audio file, if I have recorded version(only if the song is recorded by himself), it takes precedence over notes from the book. And after this, I try to understand as much as possible about work on what shanty is used. And after I put together all those things together, and I'm confident enough, I make a record and put it on YouTube with descriptions, and lyrics.

7. Personal opinions - I do everything to not involve my opinions in the recreation process, I do not judge which songs, verses, or versions should be sing, and which one I can omit. The general approach is, every version that is mention, I try to recreate, with a small addition from my site, namely: when Stan Hugill gives only one verse from the different collector, I try to find mentioned version and sing it in full, example, the beautiful full song 060 - A Long Time Ago (Gordon Hitchcock version). Same thing I will do on time when I will try to recreate songs from the next books (Colcord, Doerflinger...).