Btw, to have another, more careful, go at the point that accidentally sparked the purism argument, consider
1) moaning gits like meself have been complaining for a while that mainstream drum and bass is shit because of (or at least would be better without) the lack of sparseness, atmosphere, rhythmic variation, soul, and because it goes a bit faster than we like.
2) At least some big name DJs and producers (cf Subvert Central, passim) have said that they'd love to play / produce that sort of music, but they can't because they need to put bread on the table and there'd be no audience is for that sort of stuff.
3) Droves of drum and bass heads are getting really into dubstep, which is at least a bit sparse, atmospheric, rhythmically varied, soulful and slow.
Conclusion: there are probably people who'd be interested in hearing sparse, atmospheric, rhythmically varied, soulful, slow drum and bass.
Yeah, it's hardly watertight, but it is tempting to believe. And generally, I'd have thought that people would find it interesting if, on hearing a new style of music that they liked, they tried to incorporate what they most like about it (either abstract things like 'atmosphere' or concrete things like 'that particular beat pattern' into what they were already doing, rather than jumping ship entirely. Come to think of it, it feels to me like dubstep does do that a lot, which is part of what makes it interesting.
