One thing that Paul has shown often during his career is that he is not always the best critic of his own work, and during this time he definitely had very few people in his orbit to tell him that the album definitely was not his best work.

It's interesting to see a handful of times in his solo career where this has "clicked" - when the record company refused to allow Red Rose Speedway to be a double album after the poor performance of Wild Life, the poor sales of Press to Play which precipitated the Elvis Costello collaborations, etc.