See, the thing is, Vampire has a trilogy of Time of Judgment books going for it. It's a triptych.

Lair of the Hidden, while not a linear adventure per se, is a focused, this-happens-and-then-this-happens treatment of an idea and situation. The Red Sign, on the other hand, is way less structured, and deals with many, many more possible outcomes and situations. Think of Lair of the Hidden as a "module" and The Red Sign as a "toolkit."

Neither book is supposed to appeal to everybody. The fact that there are different kinds of books out there makes it easier for more people to draw their chronicles toward the third part of the triptych, Gehenna.

Gehenna, then, blends both approaches, but has the luxury of being able to do so because the damn thing weighs in at 236 pages (almost the size of both earlier books combined). It has a toolkit of "what has gone before" that allows Storytellers to assemble by hand an end scenario that takes into account the published backstory while leaving room for the accomplishments of the players' characters around whom individual chronicles are based. It also includes a variety of complete scenarios for those who don't want to build their own from scratch or prefer to cleave closer to "canon." Even after that, it describes our preferred/official/whatever scenario, but in so doing doesn't rule out the value of the other scenarios or the singular contributions of sovereign storytelling troupes.

I think all three books succeed admirably at what they're intended to do. I also think that those people unhappy with individual titles expected something from those titles that the books in question weren't designed to provide. *Shrug*