I agree that it's Jon's band and he's unable to deliver. But I could argue your point that he's the glue that holds everything together; because he's struggling to do that right now, and history says otherwise.

Tico said in an interview in 1987 that when he joined the band "It was a very young, immature band then, no one knew each other and Richie wasn’t in it yet. It came together when Richie came in, it started clicking."

There's no denying that the band has been in decline for a while now, even while Richie was there. It was even more apparent with the end of the BWC tour and then the Asian junket in 2015; but people weren't saying Jon couldn't deliver except in a few of the more demanding songs. Even with the THINFS promo shows, they did okay as long as they stuck to the new songs. It wasn't until they started this tour and tried to pull off some of their classics live, without Richie, that ppl really started saying the band needs to hang it up.

I'm probably going to make some people mad by saying this, but it looks to me like the only person who was there only from the time it "started clicking" up until the time everything "started falling apart" was Richie. That makes me think that Richie was the glue - or, at the very least, the "hook" side that Jon's velcro stuck to. JMO.