"I don’t think there is a right or wrong way to play a song"

Will I agree with that more or less 100%.

Dean Dillon and Linda Hargrove wrote the song Tennessee Wiskey. I have listen to Dean Dillon play it. George Jones covered it. David Allen Coe made it pretty famous. Joanne Cooper has a cover of it.

Chris Stapleton has sold millions of copies and it became #1 on the Hot 100.

You can capo up one fret and play G to A minor if you can not form the B minor bar chord for example. It is played by Chris on acoustic in the key of G so his wife, I think she is his wife, can sing it.

But...if you want to sound as close as possible to Chris Stapleton playing the song at Austin City Limits you have to learn how to form a Asus4 and a good many other things for that matter...lol

There have been some exceptional deviations from the originals. Jose Feliciano's version of the Doors song Light My Fire comes to mind.

There is a certain riff to Smoke On the Water and if you don't play that riff note for note it is not Smoke On the Water.

There is certainly nothing wrong with playing a simplified version of some song. I do it all the time, not because I want to but because I don't have the skills to do it like the original. Go try to play "Bubble Shuffle" by Larry Carlton. I have never been able to play it and Larry himself has tried to show me how...lol

Those guitar players that many of us really like have spent countless thousands of hours learning songs note for note before they developed their own style/sound. Stevie Ray Vaughan could sound so much like BB King you had to look twice to be sure.

Making very simplified versions of a song and having it be recognizable is a talent/skill of it's own.

I assume not many of us are up at 12:33 in the morning trying to learn a new double stop interval we have never played before.

It is a lot safer for everyone for me to be doing that than flying airplanes upside down 10 foot off the ground like I use to do...lol It's called a "low altitude waver" that you have to get from the FAA to fly at airshows. Still, pilots kill people at airshows doing that.

Everyone should play what ever pleases them in what ever manner they like.
There is room for everyone in the world of music and we should support everyone who plays.

Billy

“Amazing! I’ll be working with Jaco Pastorius, Charlie Parker, Art Tatum, and Buddy Rich, and you’re telling me it’s not that great of a gig?
“Well…” Saint Peter, hesitated, “God’s got this girlfriend who thinks she can sing…”