One thing I loved about Senjutsu is the amount of vocal lines that are in Bruce's lower registers. For every difficult TWOTW you've got things like LIALW or DOTC with mostly middle register vocal lines, where Bruce sounds absolutely fantastic. He still can hit the high notes, but to me it doesn't sound that great a lot of the time. See the "Where the fools are lying and the meek are crying"-section of The Great Unknown for example.
My issue with Rime's middle section isn't the existence of an atmospheric section, I just don't enjoy the chords used.
SOM has an aggressive riff, but the vocal melodies, especially the ones for the verse, are very clunky and weird in my opinion.
My issue with Speed Of Light is that it's another of those rock'n'roll type songs that I usually don't enjoy. The key changes feel arbitrary and random and I dislike the verses because of that. The chorus is interesting, but to me it feels too strained and too high.
Definitely. Take a look at Hell On Earth. It's a beloved song, but the first verse in particular is all kinds of weird. He has said before that for him the melody is more important than the lyrics, which I mostly agree with as well. There are times where you can really hear that philosophy though. Take the infamous "Now we need to know the truth now" lyric from The Man Of Sorrows. He could've easily swapped the first "now" with a bunch of other words, but kept the clunky "now"'s twice in the same line.
