I love Octavarium (the album) and Systematic Chaos has aged well for me, but 8vm was the end of an era, the classic DT era (IaW-8vm). BC&SL was a better album, and showed promise of what could have been, but MP leaving DT shook up the band to my ears. ADTOE sounds inspired, due to the events leading up to its creation, but it was obvious something was off (whereas you could argue the shift from Moore on Awake to DS on FII wasn't such a dramatic shift in the band's core sound, just that the writing changed a little on FII.) and the production values, for the most part, have been questionable between the 4 albums with Mangini IMO. I actually think they sounded best on ADTOE, JP's clean guitar is great, Myung is very present, as is JR, it's just that the drums are mixed too low and the heavy guitars are not beefy like they had been on the previous 5 albums.