It's okay- they fill a different niche, they're a generalist, not a
specialist- crittering, kid companions, inheritable good sense about
livestock, and reasonable, if not spectacular herding ability- that and
health is, IMO, enough to go on.
I totally agree with this. The English shepherd (and the Aussie, through a different route) today best represent the remnants of the old proto-collie breed before the specialization of breeding for show and trials.
The split started when rural labor became so expensive during the Industrial Revolution that it became obvious that if the sheepdog breed was refined even just a little, much labor could be saved - to the point that a single man could care for thousands of sheep for most of the year (shearing and lambing excepted). A dog that could be directed up mile high hillsides, across tricky paths, within feet of sea cliffs around the back of moor-grazing flocks, would mean that great flocks could graze land formerly unusable. Dogs that had the ability to sort out singles or groups of two or three, from flocks of thousands, and bring and hold them for treatment, meant that the sheep could remain on their hirsels year round, being able to "coom tae th' sheepherd" rather than the shepherd going to them, and then set back out for grazing.
So shepherds had specific skills in mind when they started setting up contests to test those skills. Dogs had to find sheep a great distance away, loop behind them, and bring them back undisturbed (a dog that bolted up the middle could panic the sheep and drive them back over a hidden cliff or ravine). They then had to prove that they could take directions while maintaining control of the sheep - in those days they used wild things that had never been away from their flocks - they had to be carried out to the field and dropped as the dog approached! They then had to show a few simple "at hand" skills like penning (the pens were much smaller and had no gate), separating some or one from the group, and holding the sheep close enough to the shepherd to be caught.
Any dog, any breed, was allowed to enter. We have records of Old English Sheepdogs, now extinct drover's breeds, and European breeds all entering these contests. However, the dogs known collectively as "collies" were the top performers, consistently.
Beardies, by the way, were also grouped together with collies - they were merely another variation of collie - and they did well for many years until their incompletely dominant trait of "hairy mouthed"- ness, largely died out through founder effect (consistently breeding to dogs that happened to look the same through being closely related). In some very remote places you can still find strains of this old type collie, however.
Other strains of collie were named for regions from which they hailed - the Welsh collie, the Lancashire, the Dun, Elgin White. The ones that did the best happened to be from the Borders - the mountainous Scottish border counties. Success literally bred success as farmers bred their farm bitches to studs from these counties, and shepherds from this area sold puppies literally all over the world.
This process began in the 1870s. It's an interesting fact that we can actually date the split in the gene pool through the MDR-1delta mutation, which causes abnormal permeability in the blood-brain barrier and makes affected dogs highly sensitive to normally benign drugs. Many dogs that trace their genetics to the show collie, even remotely, have this mutation, but the Border Collie does not. The split seems to have happened (largely coincidentally) the exact year of the first formal, international level sheepdog trial in Wales (to which dogs from many countries came). I can't remember off the top of my head but 1874 is ringing a bell.
At about that time, the upperclasses started to take an interest in
the sheepdog as a show dog, also - the strain known as the "Scotch
or Highland collie," to be precise. Because the working breed was also in its
infancy and much attention was being paid to outstanding working studs,
which looked nothing like the dogs the "fancy" desired, the split
happened very rapidly.
By the thirties the working strain was called Border Collie outside of its homeland, and by the next decade a separate studbook was established and the breed was officially called the "Border Collie" to distinguish it from the now completely decorative show collie. Meanwhile, the unimproved collie of the last century still lived on in isolated areas, and overseas where the unimproved dogs had been carried over with immigrant families, or descendants of dogs brought over to work commerical farms. These dogs continued to be generally useful farm dogs (Jacks of all trades, master of none) and survived as long as family homesteads continued as a mainstay of the English-speaking world.
Remember that it's not the goal of a working breed to have a few, or some pups that "can" work, maybe, to a minimal level. Just as in conformation where you want as many pups in the breed to consistently attain an ideal of appearance, movement, and structure, one wants as many pups in a working breed, working to the highest possible standard of work. In fact it's more important because performance traits can only be maintained within a highly varied gene pool, because soundness traits must balance performance traits.
Thus, I'm with pwca in the opinion that a single kennel of working dogs doth not a working breed make, no matter what the level of work those dogs are capable of. If one wanted to rebuild the working ability of the corgi breed, to the level that one could buy a corgi pup and be pretty sure it would do whatever basic tasks were the goal, it would be highly dangerous to work only from the tiny number of corgis that currently work livestock.
I'm not picking on Corgis here. This is true of any breed that once had a specific function, that has now lost it through being bred largely for conformation.