But......Why?
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Blood is thicker than ratings apparently. They are on the verge of having legit competition and they decide to get worse.
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David Arquet must have been busy.
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It's good shit.-Vince
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I'm going to get very real about all of this for a moment here...I've been a fan of wrestling for basically my entire life and honestly today I'm probably less of a fan than I've ever been before.

I feel like the entire world of wrestling is so bland and just everything is the same. I know we'll never see the attitude era again and honestly that stuff did resonate with me at the time because of my age. But it's not even that, todays wrestling is a world where everyone can work or most everyone far more than ever before, yet the character work is terrible.

I've come to this realization a roster full of A+ workers mean nothing when their characters suck ass and give me no reason to care about them.

I'll buy anyone will compete or even have a good product when I see it, I question if any product can even be good these days when everyone is offended about everything. Because honestly if AEW is just a straight wrestling show...sure that's ok but it's not going to really hook me.

Basically wrestling is a bunch of vanilla midgets these days.
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Aew mecca njpw chikara try those places nxt also plus so many new faces orange cassidy, kylie rae, so many good new stuff.
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I watched Japanese wrestling back in the day because the work was different and better......today even the WWE is full of dudes who can really work in the ring. The only real difference to me is they'll do crazier bumps and a stiffer style...

My biggest issue in wrestling today is the shitty characters who are hard to invest in and honestly watching dudes who don't speak english isn't gonna help me with that.

I can really say this for most of the guys today but for example, Seth Rollins is a really great worker, why should I care about him? There was a time that just being a really great ring worker was enough to set you apart, now NEARLY EVERYONE is a great ring worker so just that bland "I'm the best" bullshit is doing nothing for me.

There is truly more in ring talent pretty much everywhere than there has ever been before yet no one stands out.
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Oddly, during the Monday night wars (when both WWE and WCW were both quite watchable), I preferred the WCW because I thought they had better characters AND better in-ring action. The WWE's strength was it's characters. It's so odd to watch WWE today and see some really good matches and really good in-ring workers who have absolutely no character whatesoever. WWE has forgotten to "dance with the one who brung 'em."
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Some of that is because they don't have a choice, a ton of the guys getting into wrestling now grew up as big fans of the Benoits, Guerreros, Shawn Michaels etc etc so they all want to work styles like that.

The work itself isn't the problem, they just give us no reason to give a shit, no matter how good your work is without a hook people don't care.
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Do yourself a favor and watch the Road to Fyterfest (and previously Road to Double or Nothing) series on Youtube. Along with Being the Elite, AEW is using it to introduce the general public to wrestlers they didn't know about. They do better character work in 10 minutes a week than WWE does in an entire year of Raw and Smackdown episodes.
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And some dudes suck at character work, I don't exactly think Kenny Omega is a great promo.

It's just kind of frustrating how wrestling in general became a late 90s smark dream of big time workrate and it's boring as fuck.
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That's the irony I was trying to point out. In the not-too-distant past, WWE was known for having better characters than they've had in recent years. All of the guys you mentioned were pretty good on the mic AND in the ring.

There are guys on the roster right now that I think could cut a good promo on their own if creative/Vince would take the hand-cuffs off of them and not script every last word that they say. I'm sure that Seth Rollins, Samoa Joe, AJ Styles, Bray Wyatt, probably Roman Reigns, The Miz, Sami Zayn, and more would be far mote interesting to watch if they were allowed to "own" their character more and free-lance on the mic a bit.
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Wrestling is going to get better once Vince finally dies. Maybe the XFL failing again and Vince losing all of his money will finally do it.

The quality of the workers definitely isn't the issue. The problem is that they only value the brand and ultimately everybody and everything will be marginalized to prop up the brand.

50-50 booking to keep dub ya anove all except for 1 to 2 guys that are lap dogs to generate revenue for the brand.

All the workers and even the announcers and interviewers are micro managed to hell and back to make sure the brand is being put over. Over and over and over.

The Mcmahon's are WWE, hence why they can't stop putting themselves over everyone else whenever they feel like they want to.

The storylines are all fucking shit because they have to meet targets that investors demand and they have to crash book the fuck out of everything to pop numbers. It's only going to get worse when the networks are paying more for the content and USA and FOX will get pissed if the other network and show does better.

The deals haven't even started yet and USA is already super antsy. They've already totally pissed away the brand split even though FOX wants nothing to do with promoting Raw.
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50/50 booking kills everything. No new stars will be made with that kind of booking. The Raw rating this week was the lowest ever outside of holiday shows. The WWE product is absolute horseshit.
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