Serious question for Yes fans.... is it hard to be a Yes fan with all the line-up changes? What I mean is, I know at the end of the day it's all about the music. But is it harder to identify with the band as a group of individuals if those individuals keep changing, than it is with a band like Metallica who have had 2 member changes since their first album over 30 years ago?
Well...I became a casual Yes fan sometime after 90125 was released. By the time Big Generator was released four years later, I had become a huge fan, but mostly of the pre-90125 material. I liked the two singles off Big Generator, but I don't think I ever actually bought it.
With that in mind, the band I fell in love with had already been through two vocalists, two drummers, three guitarists and four keyboard players (with the then current vocalist and keyboardist being in their second stints with the band). I had no real knowledge of King Crimson at that time, so Bill Bruford was just the guy who played on the first handful of Yes albums; Peter Banks was largely an irrelevancy to me; I only knew of Rick Wakeman from his work on Fragile through Tormato (and the Six Wives album); and Trevor Horn, Geoff Downes and Patrick Moraz were odd anomalies (although I loved and still love Relayer and Drama).
I was really into Union until I stopped fooling myself. I bought Talk when it came out but have only given it maybe half a dozen spins in 25 years.
After that, Yes became mostly a nostalgia band for me, and their new material has held relatively little interest, so the post-Talk lineup changes have been largely irrelevant, except for Jon Anderson leaving and Chris Squire dying. I saw Yes (Squire, Howe, White, Downes and Davison) in 2013 and was less than impressed, even though I think Davison does a very good job with the old material. After Chris died, I have had no real interest in Yes. I thought about going to see ARW, but they're playing on a Wednesday night at the Greek Theatre, which would be a nightmare for me.
In the YesYears video, Rick Wakeman spoke about Yes still existing 50 years in the future in the same way the London Philharmonic continues to exist regardless of membership changes. If that's going to happen, they need to start bringing in some more new players who aren't well into their social security years and are interested in creating exciting new music of the sort that the band created in the 70s and early 80s.
As far as Geddy playing with Yes, I don't want to see that. I could MAYBE live with Geddy and Alex touring with a drummer and doing Rush material. Given how things ended with Rush, I don't think it would be any sort of slight to Neil if they did that. But they're not going to do that. And Geddy with Yes (other than for a one-off kind of thing) would just be weird. Are they going to do Tom Sawyer and Roundabout as encores? Geddy is way too accomplished to be a fill-in player.