Jim, one of your earlier post suggests that your expectation of a folk club is that people will hear folk songs (by which you presumably meant traditional songs) or songs based on folk styles. You seemed to endorse JoeG's description of "plenty of folk songs (both traditional and contemporary - the latter of which I mean from songwriters who work in the folk idiom"

I don't think that is unreasonable, although it has always been the case that you could also expect to hear other forms of acoustic music, some with little or no connection to traditional styles, which have nevertheless come (rightly or wrongly) to be called folk.

If you stopped going to folk clubs because you could not find the music you enjoyed that is entirely understandable. However I think you may have been unlucky, because large numbers of people keep telling us that music of the sort you and Joe have described is just what they hear in modern day folk clubs.

Not going to folk clubs does not of course prevent you from having an opinion about them. But why should we believe your assertions of what is now being played in folk clubs, which you don't attend and are in a different country from where you live, over the descriptions of those who are actually attending them?