I love progressive music, and I love metal, but I love very little progressive metal.
In my opinion, progressive metal is kind of like musical theater. It brings together two genres that are totally awesome, and puts them together in something that ideally utilizes both forms in the best way possible. In theory, the final product should be great. Unfortunately, that is usually not the case.
Just like most musicals wind up feeling really cheesy and contrived, most progressive metal ends up combining the worst elements of progressive and metal, rather than the best. Instead of getting prog's tendency to experiment and challenge listeners with metal's energy and melody (which a band like DT can pull off), we often get these really unoriginal bands who combine the excesses prog is guilty of with the cheesiness that metal is usually home to.
As far as Haken goes, I thought
Aquarius was a really great album with an original vision and a unique take on the style. I really liked how the band forsook prog metal's overdone symphonic themes for Jazzier undertones. But I haven't listened to
Visions very much. I feel like they basically repeated themselves with that record, except they replaced a lot of their originality with prog metal stereotypes the second time around.
Just curious, has JP or JR ever referred to DT as a prog metal band?
Yeah, many times. If you listen to the audio commentary in 5YIALT, he says that he's always thought of Dream Theater as "the metal version of Yes" or something like that. But the identity isn't one they should shy away from. They are really responsible for the genre. There were prog metal bands before DT, like Fates Warning and Queensryche, but both of those bands were metal first and prog second. DT I think were really the first band to be equal amounts of both.