Saw this on YouTube, not sure if it's a new drop or if it's been doing the rounds for years:

To me the biggest missed opportunity was not keeping Buckethead on board for the 2006 tour. Bumble was a perfectly good replacement but never really got to put his stamp on the material as he was always seen as "the shredder who's there to do the Buckethead bits".

It also cemented the idea of the band as a "revolving door" of musicians, and the idea that Axl needed three, or four, or five guitarists to "replace the Genius That Is Slash" among casuals.

It had knock-on effects with the promo too. The Better video was clearly intended to introduce the new band, but Buckethead's departure, and Axl's insistence that they retain material recorded by band members who'd left, meant that they chose to showcase him in the video alongside the current members, heightening the perception of a "revolving door".

The death knell for the Better video was Robin's departure, which would've meant either re-editing the video to remove him and Buckethead, replacing them with Bumble and Ashba when the latter hadn't even contributed to the recording—or adding Ashba to the video alongside the four(!) other guitarists showcased, an absurd situation.

Lose the video, and you lose the single release. Lose the single release of the album's most accessible song, and it stalls the momentum of all the promo.

All that could've been avoided if they'd kept Buckethead and the stable line-up from 2002 through to the 2006 tour. It would've been so simple; release Better ahead of the tour to get some radio play, then drop TWAT as a follow-up to showcase the Big Heroic Guitar Outro Solo and prove that Axl had a lead guitarist who was at least equal to the task of pulling off a November Rain epic.

I have visions of a TWAT video in which Buckethead emerges from a chicken coop on top of that same cliff from the November Rain video to deliver his solo.

Kind of bizarre to see those names all together in one place.

Maaaaybe if Mick could get Mick Taylor and Bill Wyman back he could squeeze out another tour or two minus Keef. Maybe. But as I've said before, bands usually have two iconic members and if one of them isn't there you can't really pull the wool over the audience's eyes. Guns N' Roses needs Axl and Slash. Oasis needs Liam and Noel. The Stones need Mick Jagger and Keith Richards to get away with calling themselves the Stones.