50/50 booking and the lack of character protection?

Yeah, the WWE sucks nowadays.

I think they've moved away from needing that one top guy to carry the company.

It's partly the TV time and the weak roster as they need those main events every week, but also creative laziness/stagnation, and there's the issue of our own brattiness. They can't protect a top babyface from 50/50 booking without us doing the waa-waa-stop-telling-me-who-to-like deal, and they can't/won't/haven't figured out a way around that yet. With a heel it's easier, but then it's like building up your monster and not having a hero to defeat him. They tried it with Brock, got cold feet on Reigns beating him, and ended up letting Brock's heat fizzle out a bit as he feuded with other big names.

There are very few strong male babyfaces and heels in the company. Miz and Corbin are the best heels by far, but neither of them are main eventers. At the top end, you have the likes of Styles, Jericho and Owens, who are great but about 90% of their act is intended to draw cheers and sell merch.

Ultimately, the attitude era spoiled us and the show. They've figured out how to progress from that business-wise with the different revenue streams etc, but creatively, we're still living in a stale version of the 1998 format.

It's a double edged sword. If you have someone booked to look strong like John Cena or Roman Reigns once was, if you protect their character, people complain that they never lose "Oh, you don't bet against Super Cena lololololz" But I actually enjoy the winning and losing sides of characters because someone can go through a slump and then get out of it. Things like Goldberg and "The Streak" just don't work in wrestling today because professional wrestling- largely due to social media and the internet- is not properly prepared for such things. If someone was to enter WWE and be undefeated (They did it with Baron Corbin in NXT to my most recent memory), who would be the one to break that undefeated streak? No matter who WWE predicted, fans would crap all over it. I just feel like wins and losses don't matter because a character like Bray Wyatt can lose more than he wins and still appeal to me.

What bothers me most- going with what you said and not looking at 50/50 booking- about modern wrestling in WWE versus when I watched growing up is that everybody kicks out of everybody else's finishers. Once in a while, like for Wrestlemania or whatever, it's not a bad thing, but if a finisher is kicked out of more often than it is used to, um, finish an opponent, then should it really be your finisher? When Jake Roberts first adopted the DDT it was a brutal looking move which you thought would knock the other guy out if not break their neck and kill them. It just had that "no one is kicking out of that" feel behind it, and even when Stone Cold did his Stunner and The Rock Bottom- you knew those moves ended matches. Now it's like, "OMG! How does someone kick out of eleven F5s!!!!!" I feel like WWE needs to rethink the concept of finishers because people kicking out of them is no longer such a big surprise.

there truly is a difference between professional wrestling and sports entertainment - they differentiate on a lot of degrees, and don't necessarily have the same end goal.

wrestling relies on wrestling. the entire logic is if you have a good wrestling product then it will attract wrestling fans. sports entertainment is a far more complicated beast...it's only true end goal is money. vince changed wrestling to sports entertainment, but the real evolution occurred in the attitude era. with the rise of sable's popularity and russo's circus-meets-soap opera writing, the focus became what would push the envelope and completely broke from the traditions of how the wrestling industry functioned.

that's why it is so damn nice to see actual pro wrestling returning in popularity all around the world - and the wwe taking note of this and wisely changing with the times despite their destructive past. nxt, the women's division, the improved roster and workrate, and wwe's globalization are all proof of this.

we fought them (wwe) over recognizing 'good' wrestling and moving on from the bland in ring workers of the mid 2000s until only a few years ago. there was a time when the wrestling fan was being completely drowned by endless cena superman programs...that seems a long time ago even now. and it was a hard fight that is still continuing - and is what the upheaval against roman reigns is truly about. it's truly a wrestling revolution.

i really wish that the wwe had gotten more negative media attention in terms of their treatment of daniel bryan. before they were going with his success, it was truly a bewildering sight to see a company resist what was clearly what it's consumers wanted to see. the modern day wwe is a bipolar product.

Too much TV time to fill means too many wrestlers needing to lose every week. Leads to overexposure, and a great difficulty in wrestlers getting over if they're losing on TV every other week.

Not to mention the rubbish storylines. I've given up watching Raw and Smackdown, it's too much. The standard of the wrestling on PPVs on the whole means I won't give up on those, but for the moment at least there is nothing make me want to tune in to Raw or Smackdown. I hope that changes soon as I'm going to Wrestlemania in three months