Wasn’t there an actual discussion between John, George, and Ringo after Paul’s breakup press release about replacing him with Klaus Voormann and Billy Preston?
Although that would have been an amazing band, the two songwriters were poles apart in their sensibilities - George was leaning towards ethereal and John earthy. And of course, there was the Yoko problem who George detested.
“So what happened to George and John?”
“Who”
“George and John.”
“WHO”
Reminds me of a recent meme after the passing of Charlie Watts of the Rolling Stones:
Dear Paul and Ringo: we’re short a drummer and bass player. Just Sayin’.
And this is what makes comparisons to the Stones’ trajectory ridiculous. The Stones had a couple facets, the Beatles had several dozen. They would’ve reinvented themselves and kept current, all the way through the '70’s and beyond.
Yeah, except that they didn’t.
They broke up. Lennon was interested in promoting himself, his causes, Yoko, but did very little to advance his music and really fell behind the times more than anything else.
McCartney was the only one motivated and a lot of his attempts come across more as dabbling than full on immersion. Honestly, this factor was present even on the White Album, with stuff like Yer Blues that only comes across as knockoff or parody of where younger, more hungry bands were going.
They pulled it together for Abbey Road, itself a mishmash of different styles and bits scraped together into a medley, though it’s very well done for what it is. It was still The Beatles, that sort of melodic pop rock that they did better than anything else. They could have continued, except that they lacked the drive or ambition to do so. Maybe they’d done it all already and were emotionally spent, that’s fine, and it’s also reality.
I’m not sure I understand your point. The Beatles (at least in their mature years) were never about full-on immersion in any one style (except on a song-by-song basis).