Harvey, your analogies don't quite work. Paintings, literary works and specific films are done once. Songs are usually done over and over by a variety of folks. If I had to re-write a Tennyson poem exactly as Tennyson wrote it, I'd just slap it on a copy machine. Why bother? If you think of your songs as poems, then the analogies might work - except they leave out the flexibility in interpretation. I'd think you'd believe the flexibility would be acceptable if it involved just the performance and not what was being performed.

If a song has bits that feel awkward, I just won't sing it. There's a song that many people love by a well-respected songwriter, and I just can't sing it because a line in the last verse is just plain bad. I couldn't sneak a change in because many people know it the way he wrote it, but I have to wonder how that line made it into the finished song!

From what I've heard of your songs, Harvey, I can't see any reason why anyone would want to change them. It does seem that some folks (not most) make changes just to leave their fingerprints on a song.