You have no grounds whatever for (once again) dismissing what was happening in Ireland because it doesn't fit your pet theory.
I gave an example of how traditional songs got into circulation via print yet you have failed to provide one single scrap of evidence of a broadside hack composing one traditional song.
It is far more likely in England that something of the sort went on there rather than the fanciful idea of the existence of a school of (pretty ham-fisted, judging by the published collections of broadsides) hacks managing to compose the "gems from a dunghill" that went to make up a traditional repertoire that managed to survive for centuries, while the rest of their dross appeared to have disappeared within... how long?
You have even dismissed, again out of hand, the descriptions of Hindley and Walton of these songs being "country" even though they they were writing at the time when the broadsides were being produced.
This description of Walton seeing and hearing ballads and songs, a little flowery perhaps, but from somebody on the spot.

"In Walton's ' Angler,' Piscator, having caught a chub, conducts Venator to an ' honest ale house, where they would find a cleanly room, lavender in the windows, and twenty ballads stuck about the wall.' 'When I travelled,' says the Spectator, ' I took a particular delight in hearing the songs and fables that are come from father to son, and are most in vogue among the common people of the countries
through which I passed.' The heart-music of the peasant was his native minstrelsy, his blithesome carol in the cottage and in the field."

I have searched for any form of confirmation that these anonymous hacks produced hardly anything of lasting merit - Hindly, Ashton, Lilley, Henderson, Wardroper, Rollins, Holloway and Black, Euing the Bagford and Roxborough collections..... all pretty crudely composed and in most cases unsingable stuff, interesting academically certainly, but hardly deathless verse, yet you claim they come from the same stable as those Walter Pardon, Tom Lenihan, Harry Cox, Sam Larner gave us, a stunning repertoire of beautiful songs that they got from the mouths of earlier generations which fitted the singers like a Saville Row tailored suit - come onnn!
So we are left with what? - first printed editions and no more.
We once asked Mikeen McCarthy did he know of anybody having made songs to sell to the printer - he said "why bother; there was enough around without having us go to that trouble".
Makes sense to me.
Jim Carroll