Kev's examples are attempting to point out to you how ridiculous your argument is, but you're not getting it.
Any given album can and will be underrepresented on a given tour. Any given era can and will be underrepresented on a given tour. That's just how it goes. You are the one who keeps insisting that these three albums somehow constitute their own era, and because no songs are being played from them this tour, that somehow Rush holds them in lower esteem. Kev's examples show how that has happened many, many times in the past and clearly has nothing to do with how Rush feels about them.
It doesn't matter that they are three consecutive albums. It just doesn't.
It doesn't matter that they happen to span a relatively large amount of time. It just doesn't.
CP, T4E, and VT are consecutive and have a similar guitar-heavy sound, which is why i loosely defined it as an "era." Don't get hung up on that word. It doesn't matter what you want to call it. It's a span of songwriting breaching 15yrs of their recent history.
No - it's never happened. KS showed examples of specific albums being left out, which we all agree has to happen (can we beat that horse any more?). He did not show examples of 15yrs/several consecutive albums being NOT represented.
Look - the vast majority of Rush fans agree that their best songs are not from the 90s-00s. We all like different albums, but the majority opinion is that Rush's golden years happened somewhere in the 70's and 80's. It's natural that the band would want to focus on their best work at this late stage of their career.
I don't think that's entirely TOO accurate. Rush didn't spend 5 years on
Vapor Trails, and if anything, it was less than 2. The time between 1998 and 2001 was spent in limbo - the band themselves didn't know if they would go on after Neil's tragedies. Similarly, they did not spend 2002-2007 writing S&A - they recorded an EP and did an Anniversary Tour in between. They spent less than 2 years on that album as well. Only with
Clockwork Angels have they spent more than 2 years on material, and that was mostly because they released the "Caravan" single early on before the Time Machine Tour, then toured and wrote at the same time, then finally got the album out.
I believe, since the VT Tour, the band has had to be a bit more careful with the set list (at least up until this tour), carefully choosing songs that would well-represent their entire career, please the casual fans, and throw in a few gems for the hard-core fans. I believe they pretty well succeeded with every tour (VT, R30, S&A and TM), including all of those aspects. Before then, it was largely to promote the new album by playing about half the songs from it, while carrying over a lot of the songs from the last tour over. If you look at the progression of the tours from the 80's into the 90's, you see a lot of the songs still carry over. The encore medley that began in the POW Tour eventually built up to the monster encore that was on the RTB tour, something that allowed them to represent their first two albums with bits of "Finding My Way" and "Anthem", two songs that hadn't been played since the PEW Tour.
Just because the band hadn't played them in so long doesn't mean they didn't love them, or appreciate them. Sometimes there's only so many songs you can play on the tour, and back then, in order to play what they liked and represent some albums, they had to shorten them into medleys, a practice the band had been doing since the AFTK tour, with the "Working Man" Medley, which originally featured "Finding My Way" and later expanded to include "Anthem" and "Bastille Day", as well as "In The Mood", all songs from their first three albums.
Going from tour to tour, you realize that they really didn't shake things up much, which is why the current tour is such a huge shock. Even over the course of the previous four tours (VT to TM), they kept a lot of staples and concert regulars, while occasionally making room for new songs. With the S&A tour, they did shake things up a bit by playing 9 out of 13 new songs, but there was plenty of setlist staples thrown in, so it wasn't such a huge change from the previous tour's setlists.
I don't think whether or not an album gets a song played from it really matters - they just play what they like. I think they throw all their "have played live" songs into a bin, spin it around, and pull out the ones they really like and try them for the tour - some of them work, some of them don't. It really depends on how they fit into the set list and the overall dynamic of the set and the show. As was said earlier, they usually work up about 4 hours of music and they end up cutting out an hour or more of those songs. "The Camera Eye" was one that was said to have been worked up for a tour but was later cut because the band didn't feel like it fit the set as well as other songs.
Bottom line - the band plays what they want, and while they may have gone on record as saying that their then-current album was a huge labor of love and that they enjoyed the album, we can't be sure if that remains true to this day for that album. It might be, it might not, but all we can surmise is that what they ARE playing is what they like to play. We cannot assume that what they are NOT playing are songs that they dislike. They love the HECK out of "Roll The Bones", but it hasn't been played for two tours - and "Closer To The Heart" was played EVERY TOUR, regularly, up until the VT Tour, then it was dropped with the exception of a few nights. Sometimes songs come and go. They even brought out a CP song they had never played before on the VT tour, a trick they rarely do and, I believe, has only been done 3 or 4 times (IIRC, "Witch Hunt", "Entre Nous" and "Faithless", in addition to "Between Sun & Moon"). Just because a song wasn't played live on the current album's tour doesn't mean they didn't love it - it just didn't fit the set at the time, and those four songs are prime examples of that.
-Marc.