Howard Jones says "In some areas they're played fairly smoothly, in others they're emphatically dotted".

This may be true of some areas, I don't know, I think he should specify. I would think generally the truth has ben the opposite of this, historically. That any given player has tunes he or she plays in the more dotted fashion, and others in a more even way. For example, the average fiddler you'd meet in a pub in England nowadays if asked to play classic hornpipes like Soldiers Joy or the Sailors(the College) would play with the quavers of fairly even lenghth. If asked to play the Harvest Home or Fisher's, by contrast, they would be more likely to play dotted(or more strictly,not dotted as such but with the first quaver of the pair twice as long as the second, not three times).