Wow, that's so bullshit everyone expected SC to be the savior record for this band. Their records have been inconsistent, to say the least, in the last one and a half decade, and there were no implications that SC had to be good, or else. From your perspective: STYE sucked, CC rocked, ASOP sucked, SOAPF rocked, so I don't understand why you and the people with your taste expected anything huge from SC. I'm sure you hoped it will be good, why wouldn't you, but unless you got sucked into the whole mystery of that studio in Berlin, you had no reason to expect anything, really.
The other points are right though. First of all, there is not even a teaser from one of the songs to argue about. Throw in 30 seconds of riff-raffing, and then we can start eating away at that bone. Until then, the only things we can start making assumptions about are a.) they have a new drummer, which is a fact, but we don't know if he was part of the songwriting, and b.) the aforementioned streak of (for your taste) bad-good-bad-good sequence of past records, which is more of a cute thing to think about, rather than a rule that couldn't be broken.
And yes, message boards are fucking antiques in 2016. They were old 2 years ago as well, but as time passes, more and more people get tired of it for a lifetime, and there is no new blood to be infused. You have to create an account, discuss stuff in a lengthy fashion, and the emojis are old and lame - it's not for this generation. *looks at his cane* Also, we are talking about a (heavy?) metal board. Pop music was *drumroll* always more popular, so it's not even like this board should be full with youngsters, writing odes to the good old TJR times.
I have to say though, in the heyday of message boards, it was really fun to be around. There were threads which went so fucking fast, that even if you just typed in some 1-2 sentence long response, there were already 4 new messages behind you.