Scott! Hope you've been well man.
I don't find it funny. I call it making two separate songs with their own unique characteristics.
Flowing into one another is one thing. Plenty of songs flow right into the next. But take for example, Erotomania - Voices - The Silent Man. If that was one full song (A Mind Beside Itself), I may like it, but I like it much better as individual pieces. They fit, but they aren't one song. They are separate for an important reason.
Songs (IMO), shouldn't be jarring. At times, sure, for effect (Metropolis). But from this listener's point of view, Dream Theater is stronger when it doesn't try to make different pieces connect as one song. Sure, The Mirror and LIe follow one another nicely. But they are distinctly different in vibe. It's almost incomprehensible to me that they were meant as one song. That just doesn't make sense to my ears.
Ever since SFAM, that has been DT though. They don't allow for that separation much, and it's one of the reasons I find myself less of a fan.
Take "Endless Sacrifice." Love the song...up until the instrumental. The instrumental is way too long and drawn out. No need for a five-minute jam there. Killed the entire song. But if you removed it, put in a 30 second, soulful John Petrucci old school solo, BANG, the song is great.
I like the instrumental piece, but not in the middle of the song.
Same case here. Had Lie and Mirror been together, I wouldn't like the one song as much as I like the separate pieces. You could call it being attention span-deficient, but as some of the folks on here know, I have a pretty good attention span, so I'm not in that class of listener. I love long songs. I just don't think pieces that are completely different than one another being mashed together as one song makes good music most of the time.