@Mellow Rhythm
Well, part of me wanted to say Geoff Tate being a prima donna in the 2000s is what led to their breakup, but it started before that. And we could even trace it back to original guitarist Chris DeGarmo leaving in the late ‘90s, since next to Tate he was the biggest creative voice in the band and his departure led Tate to take over more, but I think it goes back even further.
Because in 1990-1992, the band went on their Building Empires Tour, and on said tour,
they performed the entirety of Operation: Mindcrime every night.
That sounds cool on paper, but allegedly that tour was
super exhausting. And why wouldn’t it be? They’re performing a full rock opera, fifteen songs, of prog metal every night, plus nine more from their other albums. Pink Floyd did something similar in their In the Flesh Tour in 1977, and that similarly exhausted the band. (You can tell Queensrÿche was exhausted, too; if you listen to Geoff Tate’s voice on the
Operation: LIVEcrime album, it sounds much more exhausted–this is when he first started struggling to hit the notes, a problem that would increasingly plague his vocals throughout their career.)
By the time Queensrÿche finished the tour, they were
all super tired. Plus I remember reading that many of them were going through breakups around that time as well, so that couldn’t have helped when they got back into the studio. And creating an album like that during the grunge era… that went about as well as you could imagine. There was fighting among the members that eventually led to Chris DeGarmo leaving, Geoff took over, guitarists cycled out, Geoff was fired, Geoff made his own version of the band, there was a huge lawsuit, now Scott is fighting with the other members, yadda yadda, you know the whole deal.
But yeah, I’m convinced that if they’d simply done something different on that tour, like alternating between greatest hits setlists and
Mindcrime every other night, or taken more breaks between the shows, we might have seen the classic lineup last a lot longer.