Well, there wasn't really one, but the topic about Misunderstood made me think back to this, taken from Mike Portnoy's FAQ:
What would the track listing have been if Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence would have had to have been a single disk release?
MP: That's a question I didn't want to have to come up with an answer for when we finished the record, and luckily we were able to sidestep having to come up with a solution. I did lay awake a few nights pondering that thought, and the problem was that we had 95 minutes of music. I think off the top of my head that Blind Faith or Disappear would have been the first to go. But either of them by themselves would still not be enough to bring the album down to 80 minutes, so we would have been stuck in the position of having to cut *two* songs if Six Degrees wasn't one of them. It would have been a horrible puzzle to try to figure out, and I'm glad that I didn't have to come up with a solution to that one.
So, just for fun, imagine that you're in charge back in 2002 and you have to deliver a single disc for the album Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence. So that means no more than 79 minutes of music (and 49 seconds which is the length of disc 1 of The Astonishing). How would you solve the issue? anything goes - removing songs, editing them, as long as you present, from what is the actual tracklist and actual music that makes up the Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence album, a "cut" that does not go further than 79'49''.