I'd say he was a ham n egg-er really. His good stuff with Starto was fairly standard stuff. Some diamonds among the rough certainly. Many better bands out there. He was helped by Kotipelto being a great singer. In fact I enjoy the Kotipelto albums as good as any Stratovarius albums.
I'm a huge Strato fan, but pretty much this. The first two Kotipelto albums were amazing.
Stratovarius were great with Episode, Infinite, Visions, Destiny and Elements Pt1. Even the old stuff like Twilight Time was pretty awesome. The last two albums Tolkki did with Strato was the start of his song writing decline. Strato always used a formula which worked and was definitely helped by excellent musicians, but nothing he has ever done would come close to the scope of songwriting that Karlsson does with these vocalists. Karlsson has made Allen/Lande a more melodic rock even AOR project showing a nice different side of these two vocalists, and simply just writing amazing songs again and again.
Listen to Allen on any song Karlsson has written for him and then listen to Allen on Avalon, it's night and day. I really don't know what Frontiers are thinking handing this project over. I don't see why Karlsson wouldn't want to do another album with them to be honest, and while the Showdown is the weakest out of the three, it's still better than anything Tolkki has put together since 2003. It would be interesting to see what Rus and Jorn think about it too, and their reactions when they get sent the material from Tolkki. I don't see why they wouldn't want to work with Karlsson again either after three albums. I think this is going to be a disaster.