I'm with Smokey. As far as I'm concerned, progression is good and change is bad. There is a huge difference.
To me, progression is when you progress in the same natural way your band's sound has always progressed without being poisoned by outside trends that have nothing to do with your music. Change is when you take a different path.
Remember in Back To The Future II when Doc talks about how the alternate 1985 had been created on a different line? Use this as an example ok:
If you look at what happened in the mid '90s.... you had bands like Winger (with "Pull"), Arcade (Stephen Pearcy's new band), Vince Neil (with "Expoesd"), etc who progressed the '80s hard rock sound into the '90s in the same way the sound had been progressing for 10 years. That is how it should be. It's updated and fresh, but to use that Back To The Future framework, the evolution has happened on the same line the music had always been progressing. The "hard rock" line we can call it.
Then you had bands like Warrant with Ultraphobic, Motley Crue with S/T and Generation Swine, etc who didn't progress, they changed. They jumped down to the other line for the alternate world which had been created, which in this case was the alternative/grunge scene which had emerged as a completely different and unrelated music scene to hard rock. This is what's bad. Grunge has nothing at all to do with hard rock, and either does alternative rock. So don't start mixing things up with that world. That seems like a pretty stupid way to try to "progress" if you ask me. In fact it's not progression at all, it's just a big leap into something totally different.
About Chinese Democracy to answer your question, I am a Guns N Roses fan but just not interested in the new one because I have no hopes for it to be worthwhile at all...