"Folk music is in pretty good condition"
Sorry Dave - you can repeat this until the cows come home and it doesn't make it any truer
It most certainly isn't and it won't be while nobody knows what it is
Folk song, by its very nature and origins is the act of communal sharing of each other's experiences - what you describe is people having to pay to become audiences or switching on the box to watch people perform
The media had hold of folk music once before and they demanded tha singers sat on hay-bales and dressed up like yokels, and sang anodyne songs that wouldn't scare the ladies or the horses - when they found it wasn't 'popular' they spat it out and turned elsewhere - and 'The Folk Boom' was over
Handing the songs back to the media is a betrayal of everything we stood for and it's shown in the crap that's doled out in The British Folk Awards ot programme two of the Sam Henry tribute
A similar thing is being tried by the Irish media at present - I turned on the RTE Folk Awards for five minutes last night and turned it off in disgust - it was as depressing as reading some of these postings
The media is the last thing to hold up as 'success'

The Festivals were showcases for the best - a display of what could be achieved - they were never the alternative to the clubs they are being trumpeted as now - they were a breather from the real thing

There is no reason that people shouldn't know what folk song is - it's uniqueness sets it apart from any other form of composition - you only have to open a collection and see waht it is - The Greig Duncan Collection wiill do or the massive Carpenter Collection or the stuff on the British Library or the Lomax on line web-sites
You want new songs to learn - I was exploring the Helen Hartness Flanders web-site a couple of months ago - full of English, Irish and Scots ballads and folk-songs that were taken to America at the end of the 19th century - just before Sharp and his crowd were mopping up their gems
These are not easy listening because of their condition, bu jaysus - if I was building my repertoire I'd think all my birthdays had come at once
The only reason people can claim they don't know what folk song is is because they don't want to

Folk song in Britain (England at least) is dangerously near extinction as a performed art and pretending it isn't is an act of euthanasia
The clubs gave us folk songs in a big way in the first place and their camaraderie and mutual respect built a scene where we could maybe disagree and maybe choose different aspects of this music/song, but we all moved in more-or-less the same direction   
A club scene with ony 130 or 186 clubs (your "success" figures Dave) is not healthy - it's on life-support and waiting to be switched off
Jim