Yeah, I agree that this isn't a competitive sport (thank God!).

Your point about Dylan's music getting more sophisticated over time is interesting; I'm not sure I agree (his backing musicians have often been more skilled in recent years, whether or not the underlying music has actually gotten more sophisticated), but it's at least arguable. Lyrically, I think most people would agree that his later work, as good as it sometimes is, fails to rise to the same impossibly high standard he set in the early days, although there have been some notable exceptions.

But if what you say is true -- that the musical sophistication went up while the lyrical brilliance went down -- it seems that might be relevant both to Van Ronk's point, and to my own. I wouldn't want to get too academic about any of this, but the question I posed was whether a simpler musical structure provides a better setting for lyrics like Dylan's. To put it another way, when you have a richly detailed painting, do you really want to put it in an ornate frame?