I have had a great time at the few shows I have seen in 3.0, even when they have been maligned for lack of jamming (12/29/12, for example). I still love the band. There are still playing music every night that is worth hearing. But I'm not going to stop wishing that they play something as good as the Went Gin again just because people on the internet tell me that is a selfish thing to want. It isn't.

The phrase 'as good as' is what's messing that paragraph up, for me.

To clarify: the idea that they're not playing anything 'as good as the Went Gin' is, I would argue, a step back from the moment. The possibility. I can name a dozen '3.0' jams I strongly prefer to the Went Gin, most days. Are those jams 'better'? I've used that term plenty of times here, but increasingly I'm thinking that using such comparators prescriptively is a dangerous game. Maybe just not worth it.

Rankings are a retreat into abstraction, and though they're their own kind of fun (oh I know), the deeper wells contain pure experience. I aspire to really believing, all the time, that the best Phish show is the next one.

...

I guess I'm saying that there's deeper happiness to be had in really submitting to the best of the new stuff, rather than in finding new stuff that reproduces what we like about the old. Would I love a 20-minute funk jam from Phish this weekend? Yeah, probably. But on balance I think we're better off with something new -- even something that doesn't tickle our sweet spot in quite the same way. The old way. Probably that's healthier for the fandom. (After all, leaving aside what folks loved about pre-1997 Phish is what made post-1997 Phish possible.)

(I cut a bunch here. Hopefully this makes sense. I'm trying to mollify rather than inflame.)