Defining Prog ... could it be that simple?

Progressive music is not purely a genre. Prog is a quality. We call progressive rock such because of a comment made by Robert Fripp when he was asked to describe the music of his band, which was , of course, King Crimson. After this, music critics began to label anyone who seemed to be like King Crimson as progressive rock. I'm sure that the bands didn't mind it at the time, because it was a positive thing deviod of all it's modern day criticisms. Genres always serve as an easy way to relate to, talk about and sell music. Truthfully, any music can be progressive. The term progressive was given to different forms of art far before it was used to describe the outgrowth of psychadelic rock and classical music that we all love so much. The music thought of as classic prog, or symphonic prog, is from the richest and most accepting era of popular music. This kind of freedom and encouragement in the wake of Sgt. Pepper undoubtedly is what makes this music so strongly progressive, More things were left to do with rock music at the time, and these artists were given every chance to do them. Also, many of these musicians, as well as their audience, grew up on jazz and classical, giving them a far richer vocabulary of musical memory to bring to their approach to playing and percieving  their rock music. All kinds of music have progressive qualities to them; the term prog is derrided due to its connontations of what is percieved by many as overly long, pretentious music. Prog is a harder quality to sell generally. Most people who listen to rock music today don't have a classical or jazz background, so they have less of an appreciation for those genres, which many young people nowadays seem to think either don't exist, or are not to be taken seriously. So the fact that Tool posesses prog elements doesn't make them 100 percent prog, because people who impose the meanings of genres use prog rock to define the music that happened in the 70s up until the punk movement. When we use prog rock as a genre that is so well-defined, it is hard to call many bands prog, even if they do exhibit many qualities of prog rock. As long as the idea of prog is thought of as a genre, most new bands that have prog as a quality will not be called prog, simply because they don't sound like 70s progressive rock to a large degree. This is pretty sad, cosidering that the use of prog as a genre is generally done in a very regressive way, with people simply calling anything that seems to be complex or long prog.