To John Hardly,
re "As a life-long fingerstyler I became painfully aware that it wasn't a very social pursuit, music-wise. I have been on a quest to learn to play with others---enough musical materbating!"
I hear ya. Me too, but I've been restyling my finger-style playing rather than switching to flat-picking. Fingerstyle doesn't have to be showoff and attention-demanding. Simple, supportive styles played with clarity lend wonderful enhancement to vocals and/or other intruments without being intrusively attention-demanding. It's been a fulfilling transformation for me and I've never enjoyed the guitar more.
I've also found that fabulous things can be done with the thumb strumma, thumb strumma lick. I use acrylic nails on thumb and three fingers. Add hammer-ons, pulloffs, some individual or paired string-picking within the rhythm and other variants and you get a variably soft-to-loud, powerfully rhythmic yet supportive style, sounding quite similar, I suppose, to flat-picking, yet more versatile and pleasing, I think.
All the best,
Andrew