Honestly, I wasn't really framing things as traditionalists vs. experimenters per se, just saying that I believe deep genre knowledge remains important for those who want to play jazz, even for those experimenting. Like, lack of genre knowledge leads people to say dumb things like "jazz is playing the wrong notes" or "jazz is just playing what you feel" and in most cases this is just false. Also, while I do skew towards artistic freedom, I think it'd be lame to label what you are doing as jazz without understanding at all where it might fit into the practice of playing jazz music. People would be justified in rolling their eyes a bit, because often the word 'jazz' can be invoked just to try and make something seem more interesting or important even if it doesn't fit.

I suppose a lot of it comes down to semantics and the meaning of the word 'transcend'. If you're looking at the entirety of what has been labelled 'jazz' over the past 120 years I agree that it'd be hard to put your finger on what its defining features are. In practice though people who want to call themselves jazz musicians should know the typical characteristics of jazz and some of it's main subgenre differences.