I'd like them to just all sit in a room together, including James, to scat over stuff, and put together 10 or 11 songs as a group, with a continued focus on being concise. But just something organically written by all of them together.
But that's what they did with most of DT12 and some songs of ADToE, right?..
I wish my memory was as good as Scotty's. It isn't, so I might be off here. But as I recall, for ADTOE, the four of them absent Mangini got together, putting together ideas mostly composed by JP and JR. For DT12, if I remember correctly, James was not present, but otherwise it was kinda the same thing: the other four put the songs together from ideas mostly composed by JP and JR.
I think what Samsara is describing is the five of them getting together with FEW pre-composed pieces and just jamming out ideas together to see what comes out, and all of them working together to put the songs themselves together based on what comes out of that.
But as far as I know, they haven't used that approach in a long time. That's basically the approach that JM was referring to in the WDADRU commentary that they had long since moved on from. And even in the early days, it didn't involve the vocalist. They made it clear in the Majesty and early-DT days that that is not what they wanted the vocalist to do. The vocalist's role was not to write the music; that was to be left to the instrumental musicians. The vocalist's role was to [paraphrasing; and in order of priority/frequency] perform the vocal melodies after the song had been written, to sometimes write some vocal melodies, and to occasionally offer some limited input into the song-writing. That was the model. That is, as I understand it, a big part of why James became somewhat disengaged during the writing process for SFAM, even though he was physically there, and spent more of his time doing things like being outside playing basketball than sitting in the studio not doing anything while the guys were writing. That's part of what led to them telling him that they DID want him to be present and be more engaged (among other things) in the SDOIT era.