The thing is, I'm not convinced it's honest. It feels like pandering. Like they go "oh hey we're getting more mainstream attention thanks to our non-metal elements, let's keep focusing on them and get even MORE attention."
Someone wrote an article a while ago about Opeth's Heritage and how it felt like Mikael's last stab at making his band a headliner, and that the best way to do that was to go full-prog a la Mastodon and shed all the death metal elements that were keeping Opeth in more "niche" status.
I don't believe that any band with non-metal proclivities would shoehorn metal in there if they didn't feel that was an integral part of the sound. It's not like if you're a post-rock band you're going to get better notice by throwing death metal in there (as en vogue as blackgaze may be, it's not like they're headlining Ozzfest or Warped Tour).
Honest, to me, was Opeth's Damnation/Deliverance combo. That was honest. That was the band diving squarely into the sides of their sound and running them to the maximum. Damnation is still Opeth's apex in terms of being "soft". Heritage was just watering down the sound to be more palatable to the SXSW crowd.