Obviously the points I am trying to make are incommunicable to those with limited experience of life

Big Al, you're the one making all sorts of wild assumptions about people on the folk scene not having paid their dues or fulfilled various rites of passage in shitty pubs and workingmen's clubs. You don't have a monopoly on this. I'm sure many of us have been there, done that and written the book. For myself, I did the best part of a thousand gigs in these places over a ten year period (including every New Years Eve). Like you, I know what it's like to have a rat-arsed individual spitting in my face and bellowing out for Hi-ho Silver Lining etc. We played it too (of course) along with Johnny B Goode and all the others.....and everyone got up to dance (once they'd had enough to drink anyway). All this gave me the satisfaction of being a working musician and earning reasonable recompense....but it's not a scene I'd care to return to these days and not anything I'm particularly proud of either. It's certainly not anything I'd consider an essential apprenticeship for getting up onstage with an acoustic instrument and entertaining a listening audience in a folk club (as you seem to be implying)