Last I checked with the genre Nazis I know Children Of Bodom were "Power Metal with Harsh Vocals". This is the sort of thing that shows how out of hand all the genre madness can go. Dragonforce are power metal, and I'd say CoB sound fairly different to them, especially on Hate Crew Death Roll (Hatebreeder being my fave CoB album), but do they really need their own sub0sub genre? So even then you're getting genres within genres within genres (more bands will try it now CoB have done it), which is really just daft.

But as for the current list of sub-genres, I'd say they were pretty useful because once you become accustomed to all the different styles they really are quite different. You can't really put Dream Theater next to Opeth (who I despise) because they really do sound very different. I like a bit of Death (Death, Malevolent Creation), Thrash (Megadeth baby, saw them a while back ), Nu (Deftones) and Prog (Dream Theater). None of these bands sound anything alike, and since there are a <img src="/xxx.gif"><img src="/xxx.gif"><img src="/xxx.gif"><img src="/xxx.gif">load of other bands out there that you could say have a sound not too far removed from them, that's where all these extra genres come from. So yeah, that's why I don't think all these genres are totally useless, it's just when you get a band like Children Of Bodom that half the metal world goes to war to classify purely because they think it needs to be classified it becomes daft.

And I bet Cradle Of Filth would be classified differently if their guitarists threw in some mad shred solos here and there.