Over ride question

In the template html folder is what I am seeing there the views for Virtuemart? For example I am having an issue where I want to display the add to cart in category view and have some code that I found in the VM forum to add. When I add it to the view in the component it does not do anything but when I opened the category view (if that is what I am seeing in the over ride folder) there is not enough code there to suggest it is the category view and why I am asking?

Usually when we override some components we also clean code and delete some parts so maybe this is the cause that you thought this is not proper layout please look at the VM layouts use another layouts loaded by 'include' declaration. You can override additional VirtueMart files by copying them to /html directory.

Was there any thought of adding the add to cart function to the product category view?

No, but you can always try to make it.