I think Room On Fire may be better than Is This It so there’s that.

The White Stripes didn’t evolve their sound much between 1999 and 2007 (I see little difference in their sound before they were famous versus after) so it may not make much of a difference with them. If they hadn’t become famous at least we wouldn’t have had to put up with the long sad drawn out celebrity of Mr. Jack White.

Steely Dan - Countdown To Ecstasy was a commercial failure that almost got Steely Dan dropped from their label and was attached to a godawful tour that made the band decide to stop touring and just do studio stuff (the reissue liner notes are hilarious), sooo…uh…what happens here? They keep touring? Try a different album where they do long-form stretched-out stuff like they did with CTE? Might not make much of a diff.

I certainly agree that Queen don’t have any great albums.

Pearl Jam is an interesting case, because you said “best” and not “biggest”…I sincerely doubt most Pearl Jam fans consider Ten their best album, so you’d have to drop, what, Vitalogy or something?

For the fun of it, I’ll bring up The Decemberists, whose best album was easily their first, but nobody was really paying attention to them in 2002.

I think Beck’s best album is Sea Change, but if you dropped it, all you’d be dropping from the public’s POV is a critically acclaimed Beck album....that is, sort of acclaimed. It’s become apparent from reading Metacritic reviews of all subsequent Beck albums that a lot of people actually dislike it!! This is almost as stunning to me as finding out how many people hated season 4 of Arrested Development.

Springsteen - his best album is The E Street Shuffle, but people didn’t really buy that album. Drop Born To Run and Bruce goes back to playing tiny little clubs in New Jersey or whatever the fuck it is he did before the Time/Newsweek fiasco.

R. E. M. - Uhhh…Murmur isn’t the one the public remembers best, obviously, but it climbed to #36 in 1983 on sheer critical acclaim and the band getting to open for The Police (though IRS Records’ founder being Stewart Copeland’s brother probably had something to do with that) and be on Letterman. That being said, if it had never happened you’d need the 1984-86 albums to not happen too, thus preventing them from being declared America’s Hippest Rock Band or whatever Rolling Stone called them in 1987. Then they get the Warner Bros deal in 1988 anyway?
If you think Automatic For The People is their best album and that goes bye bye then maybe Monster doesn’t happen as a reaction to it (“guys, we need to make a ROCK album now! Look at this zillion dollar distortion pedal I bought!”) which is hilarious…
And if you actually are J. M. Stipe and think New Adventures In Hi-Fi is their best album, well, I don’t think that album ever even went platinum anyway (didn’t stop them from getting that huge contract after losing their drummer and going on a disastrous tour) so God knows who’d miss R. E. M. after that.