'Guest, JC' - you're right! MacColl was a genius and a truly great artist. The trouble with all the petty, and often unjust, sniping is that it tends to detract attention away from his remarkable achievements. I have always believed that his greatest achievement was in bringing the ballads back into circulation - nobody could sing a ballad like Ewan.
This is probably a very crude interpretation but I think that Ewan's ambition was to present the music of ordinary people, down the centuries, in the best possible light and perform it in the best possible way. Meanwhile some of his contemporaries seemed to want to turn Folk Music into yet another branch of contemporary rock music and themselves into rock stars. When Ewan refused to endorse or praise this project a lot of the 'would-be-rock-stars', and their supporters, took umbrage and have been whingeing ever since.