Into the Electric Castle is not prog rock, not metal
Ayreon's third album might appeal to metalheads, but I hardly think it's metal at all. The vast majority of these songs are way too light, especially in the first half. I'm noticing more of a Deep Purple / Jethro tull influence in a lot of these prog songs. The only song in the first disc that truly felt metal to me was Isis and Osiris, and after that the first half is pretty much rock all the way from tracks 3-9. It kind of becomes a metal album again at track 10, but many of the metal songs in the second half have a tendency to switch between this nostalgic organ-heavy sound of a lot of classic rock and actual metal. So the only metal tracks on the album for me (and it can get questionable) are 3 and 10-15, leaving 10 tracks in either rock or some other genre tackled by a two minute musical segue in the story. So prog metal is more of an important secondary than a primary.
I remember listening to Ayreon's albums a long time ago, and from what I heard, Into the Electric Castle is quite a prog-metal album to me. In fact, it was one of the first ever albums to get me into prog-metal 10 years ago! I can still find some metal in even the more rock-ish songs, helped out by some of the guest vocalists including Sharon den Adel and Robert Westerholt (Within Temptation), Anneke van Giersbergen (ex-The Gathering), and Damian Wilson (ex-Threshold), except in the softer songs of course. You have mentioned only half the amount of songs being metal, but again, even the more rock-ish parts sound metal to me, and this at least brings the amount of metal up to at least 40%, the bare minimum for an album to be considered metal. The Ayreon albums I would consider non-metal are Universal Migrator Part 1: The Dream Sequencer (the prog-rock side of the Universal Migrator duo of albums) and The Theory of Everything (more of a prog-rock opera album of smaller tracks that are part of 4 long suites covering different genres, despite many guest vocalists coming from metal bands). So I'll have to vote NO for this Hall entry, Rex.
I totally agree with Rexorcist. I listened to that album last year, thinking "Damn this really isn't metal enough for primary."
You have mentioned only half the amount of songs being metal, but again, even the more rock-ish parts sound metal to me, and this at least brings the amount of metal up to at least 40%, the bare minimum for an album to be considered metal.
Actually I said only 7 of the 10 felt that way to me, and that some of the metal songs tend to switch between the two, so it's more like 30%. Besides, I only consider something metal if half of it fits the bill, so the voting is more personal, just like Daniel's personalized 40% rule.
This nomination has been posted in the Hall of Judgement.