folk music is both material and presentation when it comes to audience expectation

If you define it in terms of audience expectation, that's correct. If you define it in terms of provenance, it's not.

1954 may be cranked out like the Wizard of Oz's warnings

Where do you get this stuff?

but behind the scenes do more than a few mudcatter's actually care so long as they get what they expect to hear?

If nobody cared I don't think this thread would have reached 700, or 100 for that matter.

Besides, the reason I care (as I said earlier on) is that for a long time I wasn't getting what I could have expected - and would have greatly preferred - if only I'd known it was there. Because the label 'folk' had been applied to something else - something which nobody seems able to define, other than as the kind of thing that gets labelled as folk.