Hi johnv,

Could you link the videos you're talking about? There are different styles of fingerpicking, and different ways to fingerpick depending on the song, etc.

Three techniques to fingerpicking:

General acoustic fingerpicking by Lisa: https://www.guitartricks.com/tutorial.php?input=596

Simplified Travis picking by Caren: https://www.guitartricks.com/tutorial.php?input=1774

Country style finger picking by Anders: https://www.guitartricks.com/tutorial.php?input=2073

The way you want to think about it is that they are different techniques. There's no universal way to fingerpick a song, each song is different and requires a bit of a tweak.