I do not agree with that. I do not even agree that the CM notation is all that complicated. A thousand songs is a lot for some people, but many performing musicians know a lot more than that now. MS Amma for one crossed that threshold probably 4 times over. Anyway, the CM system is much vaster than what most of us know, to dispose of it is tantamount to destroying it through neglect.
The ragas threads which I have been exploring, if you look at them almost all of them have been explored by the trinity for and a handful beyond that are new. This will still hold even at the time I come to ragas starting with Y.
But I need to tell you. You have stumbled upon the occasional thread devoted to the cause of the musicologist / researcher type of personality. Most of the ragas in D Pattammal's book (I'd say over 90% of them) are unused ones, no known compositions exist in them. Maybe someday in the future musicians and composers might take a few of them up (of course they'd have to take care that ragas don't get too close to each other and start encroaching on each other's scope, such a problem already exists with the 72 mElakartas). So once in a while, on this forum you will find such "Nerd" threads.
But if your goal was to introduce CM to people, then the task is much simpler and I can use your approach. I'll tell you that for most of my teens and early 20s I hardly knew more than 200 compositions and maybe like 100 ragas - I had like 25 GB of collections at best. 11 years ago, I probably knew only about 40 ragas and 70 compositions and just some 10 talas or so (Adi tala, the 7 talas from alankarams and mishra and khanDa chapu) - and that was enough to keep my interests going. I used to come to rasikas, but knowing only that much, I did not want to write anything on music at that time.
What helped me out back then was that we had this Worldspace radio (now radioweb carnatic), always broadcasting something on music every day which I'd listen in my spare time. It was entirely due to the radio that I got really interested in CM. The role of the radio in turning many people into rasikas is a critical one. If you want to introduce many people to CM, you should make them listen to radio concerts and programmes. Now that AIR doesn't broadcast CM the way they used to do, I would ask rasikas to try radioweb carnatic instead.
http://radioweb.in/
My main gripe as to why CM is not as popular as it could be is the lack of enough number of Tamizh songs to compete with the Telugu, Sanskrit and Kannada ones. Tamizh rasikas will be much happier with tamizh songs and even though a lot of things CM comes from Ancient Tamil music, I feel we are not having enough tamizh songs even now and we don't get rasikas to listen to more of them. Tamizh songs need to get popularized even more than ever.
But any CM rasika, if they are willing to go to a concert today, must be ok with the thought that one will often hear a song or a raga that one has no heard before, and they'll have to keep themselves open to that.
It's only in the last 3-4 years that circumstances allowed me to find some time, portable TB hard drives, a better laptop and a broadband connection good enough to explore more freely - I have also been aided by the fact that the bulk of CM music collections and resources have come to light on the internet only in the last 4 years - we can't imagine the efforts some rasikas have taken to preserve and convert them.
So one day, I decided that everyday I will listen to something I do not know or have heard before. The rest is then history as they say.
