To put a finer point on my preference for SBT, AJFA is an album that has a lot of baggage imo.
It's Metallica's "CNN Days" as Lars put it. It's bought into 1980s wankery. That album feels very one-dimensional. Telling songs apart when you hear them live is like "oh it's blackened!...no, wait, that's frayed end of...is it? Ah **** it's harvester of sorrow." It lost to Jethro Tull at the Grammys, it will forever sound compressed to hell.
The one metric HoS wins on, over SBT is the B-side. The B-side for HoS is "Breadfan" and which is much better than [
Checks wikipedia] "Harvester of Sorrow." (and somehow like, 4 other songs?)