King Crimson's little success?

LOL!!  Chill, I know the man.  He has to sit down to play the guitar the way HE needs to play it.  However, popularity in rock music precludes sitting down onstage if you are a guitarist.  Can you name another guitarist who sat (besides Hackett, who eventually learned how to play & stand)?  Except for trad jazz and classical players, I can't.  

Bob sits down because he needs his heavy Les Paul to be perfectly stable to accommodate his picking and fretting style, which are more akin to traditional jazz guitar (where he came from originally) than blues-rock guitar.  Holdsworth came from a completely different planet, I swear he could get 10 notes out of a single pick-stroke with his hammer-on, legato style!   I love this picture of Bob, this says it all. 

He mentioned both about their 80s output and also the 70s.  He mentions "Red is nothing like Poseidon or Lizard, mostly everything else is fairly samey." I must be missing something here because none of those three albums are from the 80s and everything else in that context means everything else KC made.  And as you agree, they do not sound the same.  At all.  And for a Rush fan to accuse KC of being samey is pretty hilarious.  Not that Rush didn't change up things but their changes were really modest compared to KC's dramatic reinventions between lineups.

I took it that by referencing those three 70s albums being different he was implying the 70s stuff varies a lot and the post-70s stuff doesn't by contrast. But I suppose it's not my place to speak for someone else, lol.

Being modest compared to KC isn't exactly unusual, lol. I'd say Rush have had a more dramatic chain of evolutions than most bands, at least most bands at their level of commercial and critical success.

That I agree with.  Key being bands of their level of commercial success.  For their level, they changed a lot.  But these changes were always within a framework where the essential Rush sound could be recognised.  They have never gone into full fledged metal or the prog jazz space of Scarcity of Miracles nor symphonic prog.  They have also played within an accessible hard rock space and adding what they could to that base to keep things interesting.

 

And that's absolutely FINE, there is no obligation for a band to have insane amounts of variety in their catalog.  But that also underlines the difference between a band like Rush and KC.  There is no KC sound, the sound keeps changing depending primarily on what Fripp is interested in and also on the musicians he chooses to assemble for his next project.  

There's next to no heavy guitar at all on Discipline. It's a VERY guitar oriented album and yet has no heavy guitar, bang in the middle of the heavy guitar era.  So one can say occupying a contrarian position compared to where rock is at is Fripp's speciality (Wetton KC offered a very abrasive sound at the peak of keyboard drenched symph prog excess).  But that position by itself leads to very different results when going from one line up to another. With the benefit of hindsight, it's possible to say now that Scarcity of Miracles was ahead of the curve in embracing a lush, dynamic production and a 'live' sound in a move away from compression and quantization.

There may be something underlying that connects them, that is possible, but as a heavy metal aficionado, I don't hear anything I would call heavy rock or heavy guitar on the songs you named other than Indisciplined. It's barely as 'heavy' as anything on Juju and that's still nowhere near heavy territory for 1981.  Rush's own Witch Hunt is easily heavier than anything on Discipline.  And again, that's still nowhere near Mob Rules/Killers territory.  Van Halen were plenty heavy too at around this time as were Scorpions (who would start to go vapid with Savage Amusement).  Indiscipline is the only track that I would characterise as heavy and most of the heaviness in turn on that track comes from Bruford's fills rather than the guitarwork.  My contention is that metal in the 80s had moved onto a kind of chugging, machine gun riff pattern while Fripp at this point was harking back to 70s Sabbath patterns or what he himself used to do from the first album coming up to Red.  So what sounded heavy in 1974 no longer sounds that heavy in 1981. 

On Indiscipline, I do hear something that connects it with the trademark Schizoid Man riff which Fripp has reused several times over in many disguises.  To that extent, I agree with your point.  There is always something on a KC album following that sort of progression, as if to establish the link with what came before.  But that is also because that liberates Fripp to pursue totally different directions on the other tracks.  So Frame By Frame...no, the closest it resembles is Talking Heads' work on both Fear of Music and Remain In Light rather than anything KC ever did.  In fact, I have never heard anything so happy sounding from KC as Frame by Frame or Elephant Talk.  The undercurrent of menace or a sense of foreboding used to link other albums with each other but it is absent on both tracks (as also on Thela Hun Ginjeet/Matte Kudasai).  It's as if he has given permission to the band to play gleefully with abandon.