I think Satellite 15 is cool and unique for them, but I guess fans dislike when an established band actually does something different. And the tracklist could've been reordered to space out the longer tracks.
If you rearrange the tracklist, you get more or less the same tracklist of A Matter of Life and Death. Not saying the songs are the same, but they didn't exactly stretched their horizons either.
DW = Final Frontier (energetic and uplifting roking song)
Colors = Eldorado (simple, single-ish song)
1000 suns= Mercy (brooding song about war... ok this is a stretch)
Pilgrim = Alchemist (short and fast song)
Longest day = Avalon (epic with a long buildup)
Shadows = Coming home (ballad)
Benny Breeg = Man (epic with help from Dave)
Greater Good = Wind blows (Harris solo epic and longest song of the album)
Lord flies = Starblind (oddball epic)
Legacy = Talisman (epic with an acoustic intro)
Again: this is not "proof" that they wrote the same album twice, far from it. But more or less the mindframe was similar. Glad that they shaked it up a bit for The Book of Souls.