Did Punk really kill prog all that much?

I thought the 80's lineup of Crimson was excellent. Adrian Belew brought a new level of passion and energy to their live performances, and was an excellent guitarist. And Levin/Bruford are probably one of the most powerful rythm sections ever. They adopted the new wave sound and made it progressive. Maybe their albums weren't perfect in the 80's, but they were one of Crimson's most powerful live lineups.

Anyway, I should probably post something on-topic.

Punk rock was a musical movement against prog, but you can't blame it for the downfall of prog. Prog was already going downhill when punk started.

I love punk, and I think it was probably one of the best things that could have happened to music at that time.

Actually, punk was more of a British phenomena than an American one. When American's think of 1977, they think of Saturday Night Fever. When Brits think of 1977, they think of punk. American 1970s nostalgia is wrapped up in disco and actually the punk that made it by 1978-9 was Talking Heads, Blondie and Gary Numan, which was disco punk or new wave. Since the major prog acts relied on America for their millions of dollars, this must have been difficult for them.  My heart bleeds. Even Pink Floyd went disco with The Wall, which I hated when I first heard it. Scissors Sisters do a disco rendition of Comfortably Numb, which is a celebration of the drugs in dance culture.

A big part of the late 1970s was power pop, at which Genesis excelled and the endless forum notes on that pro and con go on and on. I have a whole theory about power pops relation to prog and how prog created the genre that replaced it, but that's another story.