Not quite sure why you’ve latched onto this rather old thread, but I agree that straight alternate up and down picking (on tenor banjo or mandolin) for double jigs never quite works right (for stressing note four), although fiddle bowing does seem to rely on an up bow at that point, unless incorporating slurs on the weaker notes.

Reading through all the above thread, which I’d not seen before, was interesting though and surely still relevant. I started out on fingerstyle guitar way back and never really learnt basic strumming, or rather very quickly moved on to doing something more interesting with the right hand. Whilst there are some very accomplished flat pickers out there doing great stuff, it dismays me that so many of today’s younger players never do anything with the right hand other than (frankly) tedious strumming. As someone pointed out above, many of the revered mainstream guitarists (Knopfler, Clapton, Page, etc) were not just strummers, but also are deft fingerpickers and/or hybrid pickers. I guess many think that once they’ve mastered the left hand work, they’ve arrived as a guitarist.