I'm worried that +44 was, lyrically speaking, just an album in a vacuum. It basically captured Mark at (one can only speculate) the most trying time of his musical career, and he probably never had so much anger, disdain and general feelings built up for Tom.
Maybe, without Tom as the dynamic force challenging Mark to stray away from songwriting that's sonically like California, this is the most probable outcome. And the main point of the article is that the guys always had Jerry Finn as the "fourth unofficial member" of blink, and Feldmann's influence on this album was potentially not contrasting enough. When referencing this work in interviews he sounds like it was the most unbelievable thing to ever happen to him, which I can't blame him. But he sounded like a fan who was lucky to be there, and it's hard to tell how many times he actually said "no" to certain ideas as opposed to, "Definitely! This sounds like 'classic' blink." Just my .02.