Wow, one night in Alpharetta and everyone forgets 2010. Providence? Merriweather Post? Guyutica? Last year was great. These days, I listen to the highlights from 2010 way more than I listen to 93-94. Last year there were some awesome jams. The kind of music that I can listen to over and over again. Phish found a whole new style of jamming and ran with it. And this year, they're not doing the same thing. Because they have never done the same thing from year to year.
In 94 and 97 they discovered new ways to jam. The crowd loved it, and they could have stayed in either of those styles for the rest of their career and made tons of cash and made lots of people happy. But that's not what Phish does. They move forward. They find something new and work that for a while and then move onto something else. So in 98, they didn't stick with the same style of funk jamming as they did in 97. They spent more time digging into their catalog and pulling out covers no one would ever expect: Rhinoceros? Sabotage? Who could have predicted that in the fall of 97?
So in 2011 you can't expect them to do the same things they did in 2010. Or ever before. They're looking for a new things to do. They open shows with requests, they close sets with The Curtain With. They focus more on the structure of the song and the story of the song than a huge jam. Are they always successful? No. But that's what happens when you are always moving forward.
The standard for Phish should not be, "is this like Hampton 97?" It should be "have I seen them do this before?"