"As Guitar skills improve, Folk becomes a very unsatisfactory form of music. It is dull,repetitive and offers the player limited ways to develop."
At first I thought melodeonboy was just trying to stir up trouble, trolling, to use fishy internet slang. Having read some of the responses, it seems to me that there really is a schism in your singarounds. The singarounds I have attended have all been at someone's house, where all participants are invited guests. Is it true that at the English public singarounds there are two types of participants: accomplished musicians (guitarists, not accompanists; trained singers who have sung for decades in choirs, chorales, musicals and so forth) and others, like me, who have grown up singing songs Cecil Sharp would have collected had he had the chance, but who have no significant musical training? I'm not saying that no true musician learned traditional music from its source. Clearly Benjamin Britten was an accomplished musician, and I would guess that he had first-hand knowledge of traditional English music, but insisting on both criteria will result in song circles of small radius. Obviously someone on my side of the divide can learn from listening to true musicians, so I guess the gedanken experiment is this. Imagine the 13th singer in the singaround is Mary Lomax. Would you be put off if she accompanied herself badly on her Lone Ranger guitar and sang, let's say, William Bluett?