post the other day about songs that used the same guitar progression all the way through

Yeah, from none other than yours truly -
http://wordsmith.org/board/showthreaded.pl?Cat=&Board=words&Number=74425

'Tain't necessarily a bad thing, by any means. Songs based on a modal "drone" have a long history going back to very old folk music.

You must know With or Without You, as an example of brilliant use of a single chord sequence (D/A/Bm/G for any musos that don't know already). But there we also have one of the best crescendoes of all time, IMHO, i.e. the variety is in the arrangement as well as the melody.