Gurney wrote:
"how can ballads be the epitome of 'folk'songs when they were largely written and performed by professional troubadours? They are just long songs that some scholar recorded for posterity... the people who paid to get in didn't come to be educated, they came to be entertained."

The authorship of ballads - and of much of the entire folksong canon - has been discussed here at length very recently. There are strong differences of opinion and the matter may never be finally settled (although 'professional troubadours' have not figured prominently in the discussion so far). However, authorship isn't really relevant to the present argument.

Ballads aren't "just long songs" - they don't necessarily have to be long at all. What they are (the traditional ballads, at least) are old songs that tell old stories. Many of them deal with supernatural subjects such as ghosts, demons, shape-shifters, witches and faeries, that later songs from a more rational age tended to avoid. They also tell tales of love, lust, jealousy and revenge, reminiscent in their bloodsoaked, epic scale of the Jacobean tragedies of a similar period. The best of them (and of course not everything canonized by F J Child falls into that category) are simply bigger songs than anything else in the tradition. The fact that they are old also has the side-effect of having subjected them to additional centuries of 'folk-processing', so that the range and scope of their variant versions is richer than that of more recent songs. All of this helps to explain why so many singers become fascinated by them.

I'm not sure why singing songs possessing some of the best storylines around should count as 'education' rather than 'entertainment'. Conceivably some singers may have been guilty of presenting ballads as if they were a nourishing but unpalatable medicine 'for the good of the soul'. Those people deserved the cold-shoulder. Much better to make the ballads as exciting for the audience as they are for the singer.