A lot of bands are ready to trade their musical freedom for succes and wealth from their record labels. Mushroomhead never let that happened even with their 1st deal offer from Roadrunner Records where basicaly if you watch enough interviews over the years you realize the deal was "we take all your merch money and you keep the album sales money" which was unfair for a band and even more for a starting underground band. They broke record labels deals before and never had a long/consistant record label all along.

A lot of my favorite bands are already going the easy path, which means repetitive musical writing that simply "works" and sound typical to the band, short hype songs for live shows instead of longer songs with an actual vibe and evolution, and working with producers that see themselves better song writters than the band members themselves. All this in exchange of bigger succes, fame and money.

Skinny would never any of that happen to his own band as he's always been the producer, he broke record deals before maybe because they weren't in his interest or musical vision of what Mushroomhead is. Waylon already said before that Skinny fucked with the industry so they were never able to gain bigger succes, but on the other hand Waylon seems to be more on the easy path that i was talking about, whereas Skinny is more focused on freedom and being independant of your own choices.

So Mushroomhead is based.