Prog-rock seems to be a term that is used whenever a band doesn't just repeat one verse and one chorus chord sequence for the whole song. To those lengths, how good the resulting music is varies hugely depending on whether the band know why they're changing all of the chords of if they're just doing it to look clever.
Queen liked using lots of extended, complicated chord sequences but they actually worked in the song (the same way that lots of good jazz songs have complicated chords underneath) and so the music came out really well.
Bands like YES, from what little I've heard, seemed to be using the complications just to prove to themselves that they knew all of the chords shapes. So it just sounded a bit anal.
Most prog-rock wasn't really progressive as it didn't encourage many people to learn from it and push musical boundaries further, because it rarely pulled together to give something coherent. It got people into punk and simplicity instead!
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