That gargantuan thread (1107 messages, and counting), "New Book: Folk Song in England", has a long article by Martha Bayles, The strange career of folk music, from the Michigan Quarterly Review 44 (2005), from which the following excerpt may shed some light on the different fates of Dylan and Ochs:

This attitude had a lot to do with the sudden rise of Bob Dylan. All of these early 1960s folkies were more political than any rock'n'rollers. But to the older generation of leftist folk adherents the fact that a bland folkish song like "Tom Dooley" could become a number one hit (for the Kingston Trio, in 1958) was an embarrassment. The older folkies kept the pressure on, and in 1962 a new magazine, Broadside, began to publish pacifist, union, and civil rights songs under the editorship of the once black-listed musician Sis Cunningham and her husband, the leftist journalist Gordon Friesen. Along with the older Seegers, Cunningham, and other Folk Revival veterans such as Malvina Reynolds, Broadside also gave a platform to younger protest voices: Phil Ochs, Tom Paxton, Janis Ian, and Dylan.

All of these young performers had solid followings, but Dylan was the only one to become a superstar. His singular accomplishments, unrecognized at the time and still not well understood, were that he understood and deeply appreciated the fact that American music is poplore, not folklore; and that like the Lomaxes and Seegers he followed the music instead of the party line.

Dylan's first album of acoustic, original material, The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan (1963), contributed four classics to the folk canon: "Masters of War," "Ballad of a Thin Man," "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall," and "Blowin' in the Wind." His next, The Times They Are A-Changin' (1963), carried him to triumph at the Newport Folk Festival as the unchallenged bearer of the Guthrie-Seeger mantle.

But then a strange thing happened: the mantle-bearer became a turncoat. First, he stopped singing protest songs. His next album, Another Side of Bob Dylan (1964), contained songs about personal relationships, which irked the editors of Sing Out!, who accused him of "selling out." Second, Dylan gave up his original acoustic sound and took up with the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, a young white group who played the fully electrified Chicago blues style identified with figures like Muddy Waters.

Most music fans know, or think they know, that by appearing with the Butterfield band at the 1965 Newport Blues Festival, Dylan scandalized his elders and forged a brave new link between folk music and rock. The story is a bit more complicated, actually. The electric blues was pretty well accepted by then—in fact, earlier in the program Alan Lomax had appeared onstage discussing the fine points of that and other blues styles. Some in the crowd booed the electrified Dylan; Pete Seeger declared himself and angry"; Sing Out! issued another denunciation. But this time, the purists were outnumbered. Most listeners welcomed the new sound, and Dylan's career took off.

Yet it's worth noting that throughout that career, Dylan's greatest contribution has been to swim against the rock current. Most people think of him as the artist who merged folk with rock, and this is true if rock means the blues-based music he played in the 1960s. But Dylan did not sire hard rock, psychedelic rock, art rock, shock rock, heavy metal, glam metal, thrash metal, speed metal, death metal, punk metal, or any other of rock's squealing progeny. Indeed, the true measure of his standing as an American folk artist is how consistently he has returned popular music to its roots.

In 1968 hard rock was reaching its apogee, psychedelic rock ruled the drug scene, heavy metal was starting up, and the last thing the hippies and radicals cared about was country music. So what did Dylan do? He made two country-influenced albums, John Wesley Harding (1968) and Nashville Skyline (1969). A new genre was born, country-rock, which despite its later blandness did reconnect popular music with some of its roots. In the late 1970s, it became fashionable to pickle Dylan as a countercultural relic, holy and dead as Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, and Janis Joplin. But once again he defied the spirit of the age by announcing that he had become the most uncool thing imaginable: a born-again Christian. He began to make gospel albums, the best of which, Slow Train Coming (1979), impresses even secular critics with its musical quality. In 1999 he told Newsweek: "I find the religiosity and the philosophy in the music. I don't find it anywhere else." As a credo for America's best-known folk singer, this keeps the focus where it belongs: on the music.

[The word, "poplore", used above, was introduced a few paragraphs earlier in Bayles' essay: Here we encounter a major complication on the American scene, one that has been there from the beginning: America has never had folk music in the classic European sense. How could it, when its people are descended from Indians, settlers, slaves, and numerous different immigrant groups, rather than from peasants who have tilled the same soil, spoken the same language, and sung the same songs for generations? Some folklorists, notably the late Gene Bluestein, accept this fact about America and argue for a different term, poplore, to describe America's dynamic blend of ethnic traditions and its wide-open market for entertainment.]