I actually liked Lotus a lot. Way more than the debut album and Back To Basics. Stripped is the best of them, but I go back and forth between Lotus and Bionic for her second best album. I get that Bionic is probably artistically better overall and it has You Lost Me which is better than any song on Lotus, but Lotus is the pop album I always wanted from Christina. I know some people see the debut as "Pure Pop", but it has a good amount of R&B and R&B influences that get overlooked for some reason and Stripped leans slightly more R&B.
With that said though, now that she's done a mostly pop album, I think she literally needs to go back to basics to more R&B influenced work. There is an R&B resurgance lately, and to be frank it favors crossover urban artists more than core urban artists, and she needs to take advantage of that, before things become oversaturated. Some of the issues she's been having lately are really more about timing of the albums more than anything.
2016 would definitely be too long of a wait
![shutup](images/smilies/shutup.gif)
That's like the wait from the end of Stripped till Back To Basics. But back then it could be done because of the Stripped momentum. And even then it felt a bit too long of a break.
I don't think she really needs to change her "attitude" or whatever. Most of those complaints don't even have logical ground, and the discrepency between the GP/mass media opinion's on that and petty messageboard stans of competing divas is the most divise of anyone I've ever seen lol.
More importantly, she needs to focus on her political situation. I really knew things weren't going to work out this time, when she didn't really try to do radio interviews
![shutup](images/smilies/shutup.gif)
And her manager Irving is involved in some weird political siutation that probably isn't doing her any favors
![shutup](images/smilies/shutup.gif)
To make things work, she cannot be aligned politically with the wrong people and she needs radio. Without it, nothing else matters. That's really what it boils down to at the end of the day, moreso than "quality" for any artist for that matter.