I have a bit of an accumulated experience with this but some of the basic points should be obvious - the approach of straight-ahead plotted genre pulp tends to work best, as it is the closest to the oral storytelling tradition, with carefully crafted first-person narratives similarly successful as this parallel the dramatic monologist tradition. But that's not going to stop us from experimenting with other approaches - I'm still very proud of the achievement of last year's "Red Rubber Gloves" as proof that dense, repetitive post-modern prose can work in audio, if thoughtfully handled.
I agree, you definitely shouldn't stop experimenting. I won't stop listening because of post-modern fiction styles. I critique because I am opinionated, but that doesn't mean that I don't enjoy the stories on some level. If I didn't enjoy them; I wouldn't be here. When I started listening to EA, the first stories I heard were "Pearls in the eyes", "Black Swan Oracle" and "As I wish to be restored". All of which blew me away. Unfortunately I haven't yet written on the forums for those.
But "straight-ahead plotted genre pulp" is a great misunderstanding of the point I was trying to make, and that is my fault. Keep in mind that the definition of "great literature" is highly subjective when it comes to style, otherwise we wouldn't categorize Joyce and Hemmingway (neither of which are my favorites) both as great artists.
One could call stories like red riding hood "straight-ahead plotted genre pulp", but we generally don't. We classify them as classic fairy tales. Why? It is because they are built on many layers of meaning. There is the plotted story, in the Gebruder Grimm version: girl follows path, girl strays from path, wolf eats grandmother, wolf eats girl, woodcutter saves grandmother and girl. This story is extremely understandable and clear on the first level of meaning, but if you peel that level away, you get a symbolistic level: Girl is wearing red as a representation of passion or blood. Blood in the story represents a passage into womanhood. The wolf represents temptation, the path is christian values, the grandmother is wisdom, the woodcutter is forgiveness or redemption. The wolfs eyes, ears and mouth are physical features representing sexual desire and temptation because he is in bed. The bed also represents a sexual area.
It's a very clever story with many different levels of interpretation, depending on the reader, and that is what has given it staying power over a thousand years. That's what I enjoy in a story, understanding it on one level right away, and then going back and finding the second and third levels of meaning.
If a story starts on the symbolistic or metaphorical level and stays there, I feel as if I am floating in space, twirling around with no clear place to grab onto, no clear place to stand on and view the story from, giving me a literary version of motion sickness. Which is nice sometimes in a way that spinney rides at fairs are nice: Enjoyable but too much makes me unpleasantly dizzy.
But these are, of course, are all my opinions of art and are highly personal, and that's why we have such a large spectrum of style.
Please keep in mind that Little red ridinghood is an overstatement of the case for clarity, I just wanted an example that everyone would know. I toyed with using "The Catcher in the Rye", (which would have been a knockout example) but not everyone here has read it.
One more thing: Aldaister's outro to "Dog's Paw" was spot on: these highly metaphorical stories are my version of stepping out of my literary comfort zone so-to-say, which is also another reason why I am here. Keep doing what you are doing, because you are doing it well.