MK reached his best as guitar player that tour, but the performances were pretty much the same concert after concert...
One could argue that that is a contradiction.
Not really... You can play absolutely fantastic night by night, but play exactly the same. I'm not talking about creativity, I'm talking about accuracy in his guitar playing. He was absolutely amazing technically, playing perfectly, but just that.
I knew what you meant but I would argue that creativity is a part of it. There is always a point in a tour where a peak is reached after the cobwebs being dusted off and prior to autopilot being switched on. 
I think Mark's solos on this tour wasn't identical, they had a "base" and some room for improvisation which seems OK... Better than complete free-for-all. After all, improvisation is a set of learned phrases anyway, nobody never truly "improvise" something, especially MK.
He always has pretty strict patterns in his solos, in contrary with, say, jazz musicians who can play over 1 chord for two hours and never repeat themselves by playing 24 modes of that scale and 666 inversions of that chord.
I remember when I realised that Eagles repeat their solos note-for-note on live shows and thinking — but that's lazy! And then I thought "Ah, but if the solo is legendary, you wrote It and people like it, why not to repeat it?".
