And I'm also not putting down Paul's songwriting - Here There and Everywhere, for example, is one of my all-time favourite songs by anyone, ever. I just think that he was possibly sticking a little more to the tried-and-tested formula through RS and Revolver and then he opened up more for Pepper, where John and George were happy to be more experimental on record well before that.
That's just the way I see it too Peter. John's contributions to Revolver are the ones that make me sit up and take notice...Paul's, superb as they (mostly) are, do not seem to leap forwards from the previous album in the same way and in some cases would sit comfortably on Rubber Soul or even (dare I say this?) Help! Didn't John and George embrace LSD about a year earlier than Paul? McCartney's sense of hesitancy...trepidation even... is almost palpable.
That's not to say it's an entirely bad thing by the way... you could do much, much worse than stick to writing gorgeous love songs. And an albumsworth full of 'Tomorrow Never Knows' style experimentation would have been unlistenable back then.
But whereas John and Paul took the best influences from one another into their own respective tracks on Rubber Soul ( McCartneyesque Lennon and Lennonesque McCartney gave that album a wonderfully rounded, coherent, integrated feel) clear blue water opened up between them on Revolver. Lennon's stuff sounded like nothing before and the overall flavour of Revolver, though brilliant, was much more disjointed. Listening to 'She Said She Said' and 'Good Day Sunshine' is like listening to two different albums, they don't have the same overall feel to them like the tracks throughout Rubber Soul do. And that's even before we get to George! Revolver pulls in at least three different directions at once and I'm never really ready for that until The White Album where, on a grander scale sprawled across a lavish double LP set, it works much better.
By the way, thanks to Bobber for the voting link...Rubber Soul beat Revolver 9 - 4 for me. It's obviously a flawed system putting the two running sequences head to head (and with a very limited +/- 2 range to vote on) if there was an "overall" vote button I suspect RS would be even further ahead for me.
A couple of contentious points to finish on...
Rubber Soul is far more like a vastly improved, deeper, richer, more mature and well polished "Help!" Volume Two than a "Revolver" Volume One in my opinion. Revolver is just so different to every album before or since (and, though stupendously good, is for me their most overrated album by quite some margin). But check out those moptops in the "Help!" movie 'Intermission' in their suede jackets larking about amongst the bluebells...they could be from Rubber Soul. By Revolver there were big collared paisley shirts and tinted granny glasses. The changes were much more obvious.
And Revolver must have the worst, most amateurishly doodled, dull, cobbled-together kid's scrapbook mishmash type LP cover they ever allowed to be put out (yes, I know it's some people's favourite). Sorry Klaus, I think it's bloody awful!!