I personally prefer to hear a good mix of all styles in one room....as long as there are a good percentage of fresh or underplayed tunes.
Of course, not everyone will like every tune, or genre for that matter, but nobody will ever enjoy all the tunes played in one main room allnighter anyway so what's the difference.
At least it gives folk a chance of hearing something they may not normally get the chance to hear cus they don't want to wander from the main room, or don't believe they will enjoy anything being played in the R&B/Modern rooms.
I can understand specialised allnighters (ie R&B/Modern etc) catering for those just wanting to hear that specific genre all night, but surely if the music played is of decent enough quality it deserves to be played to a larger audience.
Besides which, certain tunes cross the bounderies anyway, so you still get R&B played in main rooms (ie Ray Agee/Hayes Cotton/Gwen Davis/Lavern Baker etc) and then you get the minority moaning that R&B is being played in the main room when there is another designated R&B room.....not to mention those who would argue Ray Agee and Hayes Cotton et al are Northern records...not R&B records...
I'm no big fan of Modern, but I'm sure its a similar situation.
Imagine if this split room policy was adopted and strictly adhered to all those years ago...how many great R&B and Modern tracks would have fell by the wayside as they had lacked the exposure of being played by the main room DJs to the larger audience.
A classic example is Rufus Lumley Minneaplis' Minnesota, a record Johnny Beggs started to champion at the Steam allnighters in Crewe, to a very small and limited audience.
Its now a floorpacker for Flanny at Middleton, but could have so easily been overlooked and left in the hands of collectors rather than getting it's deserved spins to a larger audience.
There are plenty of great R&B records that suffer the same fate, and of most other genres as well, cus they get played in add on rooms to limited audiences.
Just my opinion like.....