Concept Albums don't really affect my enjoyment of music. What they do though is enhance the experience of the music, as it adds more, color and character to the overall album. An album to me, is just a collection of songs a musician felt like sharing with the world.
And a Concept Album, done through a story or connected by a theme (be it lyrically only or music only), are ones that I tend to like a lot. Mainly because I like stories too, and these concept albums are like reading story books, and putting that into music form.
I can imagine the setting, the characters, and even see them acting out the lyrics. Each Concept Album by a band, I treat as how an Author writes a story. Each Author has their own way of telling the story, and uses their own style. So I don't see there is a definitive way a concept album should be done, the same way there isn't a definitive way how a book should be written or told. Each one has their own uniqueness. Some concept albums are told bluntly, like a comic strip, or through-out many albums like a book series. Those, to me, would be Thematic Concept Albums like Octavarium and Narrative (Rock Opera) concept albums like Coheed and Cambria, Ayreon, Avantasia.
Casualties of Cool is a great concept album that is done great. It perfectly describes the mood of an isolation in space vibe, with the stripped down use of instruments, sound and tone choices, like the acoustic guitar, the spacey delay reverb of the entire album, and the distorted speaker box vocals of Che'...Each production choice was used for the concept and I think was done perfectly.
Ayreon Transitus is another one, Although, Devin did kind of the same thing with Z², Arjen did a good job with Horror Story Radio Show vibe. Devin did it more with the Comedy Radio Show, even including the cheesy voice acting to go along with it "Turns out Captain Spectacular is in fact...Ziltoids Half Brother"
The Astonishing I really enjoy too because it is done like I am watching a Movie, but listening to the audio only. The story is there and it's good, and it was great seeing it live. I think that it would have been better to do what JP wanted to do, play it live first then release it later, like a movie. The tour would've been the movie premiere in the theaters and the album would've been the dvd, or in this case, the cd we could listen to at home. I think it's cool that we got a book as well, as they say, there are more things the book has that the movie doesn't.