"Nowadays our listening habits have evolved and our needs are for shorter songs."
Make up your F mind one minute you're whinging about long songs, the next minute you say you don't mind them.
"The snigger-snogwriters I've heard don't represent any community - too busy gazing at their own navels??? "
As I said, spent the last 30 years listening to snide remarks from the S.S. about 'finger-in-ear and 'folk police' occasionally it's cathartic to take a leaf out and get your own back.
"MOST of the time you hear them murdered by a dreary boring interpretation."
Not in my experience - you must go to crap clubs. A song badly sung can be too long whether it's got two verses or twenty-two and whether it is three weeks or three centuries old.
what has the length or the age of a song got to do with its relevance?
"No longer are audiences prepared to listen to eternal ballads of Dickensian boredom."
You may find Dickens and long ballads boring - GSS has already summed up Dickens pretty concisely, long or short, old or new ballads are a matter of personal taste.
If anybody had banged on about your songs the way you are here, you would have leapt on the nearest chair squealing 'folk police'. Why don't you just go off and listen to what you like and leave us to listen to what we like - you're making an arsehole of what you appear to be trying to do anyway?
Jim Carroll