many of the protagonists were absolute crap at their instruments

One of the best things about punk was the refusal of the idea that to make music you had to be a technically expert musician. The ideology was neatly summed up by Sideburns Fanzine in '76: "This is a chord, this is another, this is a third. Now form a band.". How democratising is that? The complete antithesis to muso snobbery and exclusivity.* Perhaps something that the folk scene should embrace, especially as (in the UK at least) it becomes increasingly dominated by virtuoso technicians?

The real flowering of this approach, of course, came in the years after punk with the explosion of the DIY scene, which is being obsessively catalogued by the Hyped2Death label with their wonderful Messthetics series of CDs, which takes me right back to listening to the Peel show as a teenager...

* The irony is, of course, that there were plenty of accomplished musicians in and around the punk scene.