I haven't read the snobs objections to which you refer in this rant. . .
. . . and I haven't been to Southern since it was in Devore,

but

In my never-to-be-humble opinion, the audience is what matters. The SCA has no audience. They do their events for themselves. That's all well and good, but it means they don't have to take the audience into account. SCA and ren faires are different animals.

Ren faires are about entertaining a crowd that pays admission & buys goods which support the event. Among other things, I play music at the faires. With the exception of Greensleeves & some madrigals, NONE of the music at faires are period. Even if the lyrics are from that time, the music wasn't recorded until a century later at the earliest. We present an image to take people out of the present & give them a feeling of the past. It's impossible to dot every "i" and cross every "t". The information just isn't there. Even in instances where it is, it's not always desirable. We are not presenting a dry history lesson, we're presenting a renaissance THEMED entertainment.

That being said, the history snobs keep us honest.

The renaissance was a fascinating time in history, with dynamic changes going on in the arts, sciences & world culture. That's why it took off as a theme for an entertainment genre in the first place. There's plenty to draw from that is interesting, entertaining and instructive about the period. It's the snobs that keep us from being a "tie die fair" - from going off the deep end. There was an episode of Futurama where they went to a year 2000 fair. Wild west cowboys on rocket horses were going on a brontosaurus round up. Many renaissance fairs have become just that. Those fairs are copies of LHC's original Renaissance Pleasure Faire. They are what they are, but the audience that grew up on the original is more sophisticated than that, and they crave an escape from the troubles of this modern time. I remember that painful ad campaign that had print ads saying "The man show began in the 16th century", and the radio spots that had the surfer dude saying, "There's beer, & boobs & babes!". They played to a lowest common denominator that wasn't the California audience & wondered why the attendance kept dropping & eventually bailed on Northern, saying there was no audience. Then the inmates took over the asylum, and Northern is still going strong. What did we know that REC didn't? We knew our audience, and they're what matters. They are our life's blood. THEY are the ones we have to entertain.

If we doggedly cling to the history, the entertainment is lame. If we abandon it entirely, the illusion of the past and the blessed escapism our audience seeks is lost, and again, the entertainment is lame. The real trick is straddling the line. Keeping things entertaining to modern sensibilities, while keeping the illusion of the past alive. We have the ability to do that - to lead as we once did in this genre. We're the original. We can look to our own history to make the Renaissance Faire the spectacular entertainment that inspired hundreds of copies. Or we can try to copy those copies.

Each copy loses a little more of what was special in the first place - in my never-to-be-humble opinion.