to be fair mu have probably signed more stuff from footwork producers than they have uk people doing footwork inspired stuff.
I'm glad Mu did that, and I'm glad Hyperdub even bother to sign ANY legit Funky producers, but it's also not enough; everyone should be conveying some interest in these genres if they're going to put out an artist who's borrowing from their elements but doesn't give back.
I feel like there's so much of an emphasis on taking "THE MEN WHO TAMED THE SAVAGE GENRES" artists and putting them on pedestals... But nowhere near as much emphasis on the genres themselves. Juke is ridiculously lucky it's been hanging on this long, but then again, it's a more deeply rooted culture than say Funky got to be.
Now returning to dubstep specifically, you know what the problem is? Dubstep is not taking new elements and fitting them 'into' dubstep. Allow me to make an example... "Paris" by Jay-Z and Kanye is obviously borrowing from dubstep, but it is a rap record, and not a dubstep record. But it has succeeded so well because it doesn't force rap into the context of dubstep, it places dubstep as a situation in rap. It's why that record is immensely popular all over the world, and nobody gives a damn about any of these forced rapper spitting over dubstep collabos that have been foisted time and time again.
What has happened with these producers is that maybe dubstep was never 'theirs' to begin with like the first wave or two. So when they discover new sounds, they just gravitate torwards it rather than try to pull these foreign ideas into dubstep. Remember in '07-'09 or so when it was so fruitful to try and slip all kinds of weird 'errors' into dubstep to give it color or character? No, now the producer takes all the structure of the other record, and just changes the BPM and says "Oh yeah... It's close to the tempo of all these other 'dubstep' records I've been dropping. We're good." But NO, that is not the case.
The number one problem it seems is that people have this attitude "I don't like pigeon holes... I make music!" Bullshit. People need to make clean breaks from genres if they don't want to be in it any longer. If you've gone out of your way to duplicate a scene, and work yourself in that scene, you have a responsibility to at least live with that scene. I may find a majority of his catelog past a certain point boring, but Mala's doing that much with the banal 'cuban music dubstep' thing. He isn't just making cuban music and then throwing some cheap dubstep paramaters and saying "Oh look guys, it's for the clubs." Not everything's going to work for people, but at least someone's trying to put some new life into the genre, rather than switching from either the extremes of orthodoxy with "WE NEED TO SOUND LIKE IT WAS MADE FOR A '06 YOUNGSTA SET!!!" or hopelessly following whatever your musical tastes have brought you outside of your genre, and then forgetting about things like everything you've done before.