I agree that ...And Justice For All is a boring album (though One is definitely one of the best songs on it), and that Metallica hasn't released anything thats at least decent since MOP, but I still think the "if Cliff hadn't died things would be different!" argument to be pretty dumb. At the time, Cliff was probably the least into metal of the four; if I remember correctly, he listened to a lot of hippie rock and was mainly responsible for the more groovy side of the band, as seen in Orion. Its not like at the time of Master of Puppets, everybody was saying: "Well, there's a very good chance that Lars, James and Kirk will experiment in modern rock, but Cliff? No way!" Impossible to tell what would have happened.