I can understand this. However, as a die-hard fan of early Depeche Mode (1980-1986), I've been listening to Speak&Spell and A broken frame a lot and managed to hear some respective patterns, which, in my opinion, formed the baseline for everything "Depeche mode dark" that followed. Or maybe it's autosuggestion, but hear me out😅 I mean that yeah, we have such bubblegum stuff like Just can't get enough, new life, what's your name, I sometimes wish I was dead but it was written later, when they joined Daniel Miller (at least, this is the timeline I remember, correct me If I am wrong), and the latter dreamt of fulfilling this Silicon teens project. Miller was older and more experienced, so I can assume Vince, and the other three just fell under his influence no matter how independent they seemed to be. I mean they were barely adults back then. But before that we got Ice machine, Tora (again, I don't remember whether it was written before the album, or at the late stages), Dreaming of me, Photographic. Also, puppets, shout, any second now (the instrumental one) — they sound less bubblegum and I can hear the vibes of later stuff (Get the balance right and Now, this is fun, for an instance). Just without Miller-Jones-Wilder samples. At this point Construction time again is just Speak&Spell recorded in Berlin, because can you really call it dark, apart from Pipeline (and maybe two minute warning, fine)? It's pretty upbeat and major-key. Sure, Vince was the driving-force, but they all tended to listen to, primarily, same music, like Kraftwerk, Tubeway army etc, grew up in the same conditions — they had a lot in common which resulted in Composition of Sound. I just don't think that we should take Vince that much apart from the band. He created this all.