This is way off topic, but…
This reminds me of a conversation I had with some very old friends of my parents after my father died at the age of 90.
My father has his first salaried engagement as a musician in the early 1950’s as a viola player in the Yorkshire Symphony Orchestra. His friend (who in my childhood I knew as “Uncle David” ) played bass in the same orchestra. Sadly, the YSO was disbanded a few years later and many musicians moved to London.
My father worked as a freelance violist in theaters before joining the BBC and eventually becoming the BBC TV Music Librarian.
“Uncle David” joined the London Philharmonic Orchestra and played there until his retirement. It’s one of London’s major Orchestras, and yet in the late 1950’s (and I’m not sure how long this continued) all its players where hired as freelancers.
Anyway, David’s wife, who was a regular attendee at her husband’s concerts (a 1950’s classical music groupie) , tells how a window-cleaner came around offering to clean the outside windows. She thought she recognized him, and then realized that he was one of her husband’s fellow-musicians in the LPO.
So, the practices you describe had not entirely disappeared even in the second half of the 20th century. Hopefully they’re behind us now.
David.
Speaking from my experience in a collegiate concert-band setting, anything past ppp isn’t heard at all and anything past fff (really, ff) is pushed out so hard as to be ugly as sin. There is an effective “resolution” to communal dynamics, in my experience, and it’s surprisingly low. Choirs and soloists can fudge the in-between dynamics a little better, I think. I know anytime I’ve personally been handed a part with ffff as a trombonist my reaction as been twofold: 1.) roll my eyes and 2.) you asked for it…
Between ppp and fff there are at least 8 common marked gradations (which will all be interpreted slightly differently by each human) so there’s still a lot of variety there, especially if other more vague markings such as hairpins and cresc./dim. are thrown into the mix.
There’s a reason I used to work two jobs… one full time and the other part time on weekends as an organist.
I always sigh when people balk at my wedding fee; they don’t balk at the florist fee or the photographer’s fee, or the… you get the point. There’s a reason it’s called “supplemental” income… because it supplements the income I should get paid but don’t. Yay full-time careers in the arts!
Yes, I think church organists in particular are often assumed to be doing the job “for love”.
In my late teenage years and early twenties, when my local church was without an organist, and I and a retired person covered all the services. I don’t think he was paid and I certainly wasn’t. I also directed the choir practices.
That’s a sad comment on how musicians are valued, but it was a great learning experience and there were some magic moments.
One time, after the service, the vicar had a complaint that my improvised playing during the Communion was too loud.
Right after that, a lovely lady in her eighties , a pillar of the church community, sought me out to thank me for the same music because is was “so uplifting”.
I felt vindicated.
Tchaikovsky is a clear outlier in his use of dynamic marks! They are always relative, not absolute.
All dynamics are relative. 
Agreed. But someone created a dynamic power curve and now some folk appear to want to imbue it with a mystic absolutism.
Romanos401
as a student I had similar experiences, playing the organ at weddings and funerals.
Most people knew there is work involved, left the musical choices to me and payed a fee by themselves.
People though with special wishes “we would like you to play Peter Gabriel - The book of love” forgot about the fee. I even had people asking me to come around and play some suggested pieces. Those were the ones for whom it seemed painful to pay money for the service. Strange world.