This was a great article, but I can't say that I agree with it all. But to be honest, I've never listened to Coventry. Not once. My most prominent musical memories of that weekend were all negative or weird:

-the horribly wrong chord Trey played during Free (he played a half-step off the right one)
-Trey falling apart during the composed part of Stash
-the oddness and generally weird vibe when they opened their final shows with Walls of the Cave
-Trey going AWOL during "Drowned," noodling the jam as though he wasn't even hearing the rest of his band
-the lack of end lyrics to Hood
-and of course, the wrong key of Curtain With. I can't imagine how @Icculus can remember this moment with fondness, since for me, it represented everything that was wrong with that weekend.

To be fair, I'm sure that if I listened to Coventry again, I'd find plenty of things that I liked (I remember really enjoying the Chalkdust and the Reba). One thing I wrote in my setlist book at the time (which I still have) was Split Open and Melt -> End of Phish jam -> Ghost. That space jam (which was as close to the "storage shed" as Phish ever got in the pre-3.0 era) was indicative of everything that weekend represented in music. The band literally fell apart, and we were left with a primordial space. It felt like the end of Phish during that jam. And it gave me a weird sense of closure.

As many other people have said, Coventry was actually a good thing for me in the long run. It let me let go of Phish for a long time. I was genuinely content with the non-existence of Phish afterwards, because I figured that if Coventry was that bad, then they really shouldn't be continuing. It let me be at peace with their breakup. If Coventry had been mindblowingly good, then I would have been so depressed that things were so great at their final show and we would never hear them again. I didn't listen to Phish regularly after 2004, and it was only in 2008 when they announced their reunion that I fell headfirst back down the rabbit hole.

I disagree with @waxbanks about those Great Woods shows, since I loved both of them, especially night 2, which was one of the most complete second sets of 2004 (if they had closed the set with the end of the unfinished Antelope instead of Sample, can you imagine?!). The 2001 (especially the jam after the first "verse" was outstandingly funky, and the super slow Tweezer ("last" Tweezer ever) was really nice. Waves was special, and the jam into Timber was magnificent.