@FACTSAREUSELESS
I guess that's where we differ then. I don't think the act of playing a wider variety of songs is inherently creative. And the vast majority of songs they aren't playing are ones they've never gotten particularly creative with. They aren't playing the 3 songs I want to see the most on any given night, Timber, Taste, Vultures.

Trey clearly put a ton of time into GD50. If that lead to a decision to keep the pool of songs smaller and focus on songs that they really want to play a lot. That's fine. And the big reason it's fine with me is because the improv isn't suffering. It's thriving. Interestingly enough, the only other time I've personally felt the improvisation was flourishing like this in 3.0 is when Phish went the other direction and did 200 different songs Summer Tour 2012. There's no right answer.

I'll gladly see Birds three times instead of Timber, Taste, and Vultures if the trade off is that the time Trey didn't spend brushing up on rarer Phish songs was spent generally getting more awesome at guitar.