Just read your anecdote Jim. Very interesting.

There's certainly a tendency to nitpick in the folk and world music community. I sometimes think it would be a good thing if no CDs came with liner notes or press releases because it would deny reviewers the opportunity (which so many of them seem to relish) to spend more time banging on about minor typos in the liner notes than they do describing the music.

(Of course, when there aren't any liner notes, reviewers invariably harp on about the lack of liner notes!)

the trouble is though that someetimes a reviewer simply can't win. With a large project such as the one you describe, I can equally imagine someone complaining that, say, a succinct 250 word review wasn't giving it the respect it deserved. I mean, it's actually refreshing for me to hear someone complaining about a review being too long! Normally it's the opposite.

I think it's a real shame that further projects were shelved as a direct result of two pedantic and curmudgeonly reviews. But is it not a tiny bit of an overreaction, if you don't mind me saying so? As others here have pointed out, a review is only ever one person's opinion. And readers of reviews do read between the lines. There is just a chance that those two reviews, irritating as they were, may well have drawn some attention to the project that otherwise wouldn't have existed.