Yooo I've been waiting for one of these to pop up. I haven't been a member long but when I read the OP I kinda knew which members would fall on which side, lol.
I think all parties represented their cases pretty well.
I think the original beef is a bit complex even though it's an old one and everybody kind of knows it by heart.
The 'prog/chops' set is annoyed that the admittedly wise advice of serving the band/song first has become a kind of fetish and an altar to mediocre playing. I think the last straw that causes threads like these is the sense that you should be at least a little bit ashamed of the self-centered nature of your quest for, or at least your focus on...the chops, if the chops be what ye seek.
But in this thread I've also seen very balanced responses from the 'trad' set. Forum drummers are sensible (mostly) and seem to have a common sense of what and when chops are for, even in a professional setting.
Whoever said 'most old rockers have bad chops and loose time' dropped a pretty big clue.
The beautiful thing about a worldwide drum forum is that hobbyists and pros, rock and metal and jazz can mingle.
But when a bar-blues drummer takes to a post and says stuff like "I'd rather be a simple player than a chopper who doesn't play musically", the proggy folks are raising their eyebrows, starting to think that these kinds of players probably don't even exist. Like a straw-man drummer, the player somewhere in real life who embarrasses themselves by overplaying every time, reminding all the money beat devotees that they made the right call.
The fact that these mantras keep getting repeated implies to annoyed proggys that there must be a generation out there of lost compulsive overplayers, stuck practicing aimlessly in their house cuz they can't figure out how to groove. Something like that, lol.
When I was a coming up fusion player I was obliged to study Weckl for a season. One day I was listening to Synergy and had this spontaneous impression: "This dude does nothing BUT overplay!"
And really he does, literally, and masterfully. He floats and flutters, commands the vibe from the first note to the last.
Subjective, absolutely. That's why this thread intrigues me. I don't think the OP was making a judgement about a particular style or generation. Perhaps more a critique of how we virtue signal stuff unnecessarily when we talk about drums, particularly regarding skill and technique.
Wrapping up now with my tongue in my cheek. So that OP video, that fella is a gospel chopper. Back when I didn't have chops of my own I wanted to be a gospel chopper. Now I won't touch the stuff. Gospel chops are big in Korea now I think.