Modal geography

Hi.

I had a discussion with a friend about the prevalence of ionian mode
respect lydian mode in MODAL music throughout the ancient world.

Maybe someone of you know something about it or can give us a list of
sources to online or offline (books) material.
Maybe there is some musician which play ethnic music of his country
which can give us his personal opinion based on experience.
Is it possible to have a statistics about the use of major scale
modes in ethnic music of all the world?

My position is that, although lydian is harmonically more stable
(Cmaj9/#11 better than Cmaj11), ionian is melodically better (4/3 is
much stable than 7/5, 11/8, etc).

Ciao

Lorenzo