I never said that BLS sucks. Never said that Dimmu was all that good either. But not worthy of being a worst of.
As far as Iced Earth are concerned, they make me think of almost any other power metal band I've ever heard. For such a wide genre, a lot of bands seem to be cloggin up the same area of power metal. Granted Iced Earth has mad musical chops, but they seem to sabotage all their effort by climaxing a song at the wrong time and then having nothing to follow up. not to mention the fact that (from what I've heard of their material, just so you don't get the wrong idea about this being baseless BM elitism. It's only half that) all the songs I've heard from them run like clock work. It's either chug chug to slow down to solo to slow down to chug, or it's acoustic, to booming triumph metal to acoustic niceties.
To me, that makes a band stale and completely uninteresting, no matter how soaring the riffs or technical the leads. I see them in this realm of having a great mystique and hype like Manowar, while having about the same level of songcraft. Suffice to say that neither of them will see a red cent from me.