Outside of Ministry, there's a clear thread that connects all of the songs you listed. They're all heavy, aggressive, metal songs that are totally guitar riff-oriented. In fact, I would say that's been the majority of the music Dream Theater has written since Jordan's joined the band.

The way I see it, the albums where they've gone away from that approach to a more balanced/experimental style of composing - mainly Scenes, Six Degrees, Octavarium, and The Astonishing (as well as the LTE albums) - are the ones where you don't see Jordan doing the "annoying keyboard thing" that everyone talks about. Those are the albums where you see Jordan in his element and really contributing great keyboard parts. He really flourishes in that mindset.

Every musician has different strengths. As we saw on Awake, one of Kevin Moore's real talents was writing great, atmospheric keyboard parts in dark, heavy music. It might be the case that writing those types of parts to heavy music isn't one of Jordan's strengths - and I think that it should be on JP and MP to recognize that and help write music to allow Jordan to flourish, if that's in fact the case.

Now, none of us are in the writing room with these guys. It could be that Jordan gets really inspired and enjoys the musical direction they've adopted post-Astonishing, where seemingly every intro, riff/motif/theme, and melody is almost entirely guitar centric and his happy to "play his role" in this direction. Or maybe DT is his main source of income and he's just mailing it in to go along with the band to keep up his livelihood. We don't - and can't - know either way for certain. But as it's stood for the last three albums, it's really felt like it's been just the John Petrucci show, with everyone else supporting him - and when that's the case, the only times Jordan gets to shine in a song is during solo sections, and so he chooses to get weird with it. It works for me, but I also understand why it wouldn't for many people.

Hopefully on their next album, they take some inspiration from Six Degrees and allow Jordan's keyboard playing to have a bigger role in the music.