I think that the reaction to altyclb and pop was very conditioned by what has been said by the band (mainly bono) during the recording sessions.
Bono likes to give great words to leave everybody (including me) excited, i remember that in each one of these albuns he named pop as a techno album and atyclb as a soul album very earlier in the recording sessions. This ended to throw a big confusion because in the final product there are only traces of what he said.
Of course that there are visible influences of techno on mofo and discoth?que (which had their time and are left behind), and of soul in ialw and siam (which for me they should explore more) but,
at the end, both albuns are just collections of what u2 does best - high quality pop songs, although with different approaches in composition and production, even inside each album.
So, for me, as a reaction to bono predictions i got a little dissapointed when the albuns were released, but come on, if anybody asked me to list the best 20 songs of the last 10 years, i would surely include gone, sats, please, velvet dress, wudm, beautiful day, new york, walk on, ialw, siam, wilatw (yes, wilatw)... therefore we must be talking about GREAT albuns!!!
Just as final note, I think that a similar thing will happen with this new album and all this hard/heavy rock talk. Browsing this forums I realized that a lot of people are expecting already a dozen of songs full of noise, distrotion, screams, solos of minutes and all the big noise. I think (and I hope) that we will not have that. Maybe we'll identify that in a couple of songs and for the rest they will not escape from their "traditional" songwriting that btw makes them the best band in the world.
bye