Ron,

Thanks for putting up with the hyperbole.

Speaking only for myself, given the logistics and costs of attending, it would take more than "tweaking" (like adding a token traditional musician or two) to get me to one of the big festivals.

More generally,
it sounds to me that a recurring theme in this thread is that the big festivals have become prisoners of their bigness, prisoners of the expectations of the people who put them on and the people who attend them.

To use a term from the business world, they are prisoners of their "culture." Changing a culture is not a simple thing and takes a whole lot more than an "outsider" filling out some comment cards. Sometimes what looks to be a simple "tweak" turns out to require fundamental changes in an organization.

That's not to say it shouldn't or cannot be done. I'm just not gonna put it on MY to-do list.