I personally think Home is a very good album, maybe not my favourite among other albums... yet.
But that's not the point.
The point is, most of us are selfish when deciding on wether we like something or not (myself included, probbably most of the time). We say stuff like "I don't like this because I like guitars and there are no guitars", or "I miss the clear vocals like on song/album xyz", and so on. And with such reasoning and by dismissing songs/albums/"art in general" by result of such reasoning, we are forgetting an important part of what art is.
I think that The Gathering deserves more than such casual treatment by people who are it's fans.
As someone allready said in this thread I think, an artist doesn't create to please the masses, but because he has to, but don't think of this as artist's selfishness. He needs to express whatever it's that is impacting him because it is impacting him. A poet writes a poem about (i.e.) rain and sadness because rain makes him sad, not because he thinks that Bob the poet fan likes such poems.
Since we all agree that The Gathering are artists, there must be a reason for them making an album which is "such and such" in every aspect, and not "like this and that". Crafting music is a very deliberate process, consisting of many trials and errors, many fine tuning and polishing, during weeks, months and sometimes even longer. So, we can surmise that the album Home is exactly (or as close to it as the band could make it) what it needs to be.
So, if we don't "like" it, what good is it? It is good because it is showing us something, it is like a page in someone's diary, in this case in a diary of a band we hold dear, and of people who we have established have credibility and the power to move us.
If you don't like the album at once, it may mean that the music is not "resonating" with you... But maybe even more important than this resonance I think is the message and the insight that this music can provide.
Don't say "this song should have more distorted guitars", ask yourself this - "they could have put distorted guitars here, but they didn't. What does that mean, what were they trying to tell me with it?" You know they know how to use guitars and distortion, there is ample proof of that in previous works, so why not now?
And when and if you can enter the state of mind and inspiration of the authors when they created "song A", then you can say "I know you better now, authors, but this thing that moved you to create A, it moves me to create B", and then you're halfway to making your own album, although with borrowed inspiration and you have to find your own technical and artistic aptitude to express it.
Oh and, sorry for the long post, I just had to get it off my chest.
So, enjoy art to the fullest, don't skip on the important parts.