I was, quite frankly, horrified by the didactic, bombastic and insular attitudes of many of the EFDSS people I met when I first got into ETM in the late 70s. Over the years the organisation has changed out of all recognition, has done brilliant recent work and has more in the pipeline, and I'm now proud to be a member and supporter.

I'm personally more interested/involved in the dance and music side of ETM than the song side, but as far as I can ascertain there is no imbalance or bias in the weighting currently given to those aspects of the scene by EFDSS. Projects are funded and maintained across the interest areas, recent outreach projects such as that described by Nick have incorporated elements of all the different strands, and I'm not aware of any rumblings of discontent from one 'side' or another. From what I see as a current member, the days of 'Dance Earnestly And Forget About Song' are long gone and good riddance to them.

However I know nothing of the politics and horse-trading that no doubt accompanied the 1934 merger, so, like other contributors, I can't really answer Dick's question, because I don't know what the future of the FSS would have been had it not merged into part of the new EFDSS.

So that's probably a way to progress answering the OP, if anyone can take the trouble to shed any light on the history of the merger ...