seriously, Lith, you need to control your anti-Stapp rhetoric bullshit & try & contribute something positively for once. you think not having Mark & Flip is the only reason why it's taken him so long? Jesus Tapdancing Christ, you're naive. Most bands end up writing (or at least partially writing) more than the number of actual songs that appear on the album. Or, in the very least, if they only write 10 or 11, they usually refine them a great deal.
There's also the matter of rehearsing for live performances immediately after (and also before) the album comes out. It's not as though it took Stapp a full 4 years to write new material, or even 1 1/2 years since they officially split. So, let's see, 1 1/2 years really isn't all that long. I mean, the man evidently had some tricky personal issues to deal with. And just because it takes awhile to write new material doesn't mean you suck: how many years was it between Boston's 2nd & 3rd, 3rd & 4th, and 4th & 5th albums (if you don't know, it's 8 years every time)?
It also remains to be seen how much goneblind contributed to the songwriting process, but I would guess that, just as with Creed, Stapp wrote the lyrics, and the other guys laid down the rhythm section parts. You also don't know how
long most of the songs are. It's one thing if they're all 3:00, but I would imagine they probably run somewhere between the 4:30 & 5:30 range, giving you a good 45-50 mins of music, which is more than a lot of bands these days provide of original material.