You can understand why WWE has this attitude when you consider when the last time the vocal internet fans would say a year of WWE programming was good. I thought 2015 and 17 were good years in recent memory, but even those were responded to overwhelmingly negatively online by the kind of people who post a lot about wrestling online.
I think 2008 might be the last year the internet responded generally well to WWE, and even that had a lot of “Cena is Superman”, “HHH is burying people” “Why isn’t Santino/Punk/Morrison/MVP/Kennedy/etc pushed more”.
Internet fans complain so much that for WWE there’s no telling the difference between when something is “decent but not great” and horrific and channel change worthy.
Nah, they’ve spent the past 17-18 years booking how Vince wants regardless of what the crowd wants. For a while, they still tried to give the crowd what they want, but in the past 4-5 years, they’ve gradually dropped all pretenses of booking what anyone wants except Vince. You mentioned the 2007-08 era. Yeah that era was mostly bad, but at least there were people who were legit over that the audience wanted to see that sorta got to progress up the ladder. The serious problems were people being fed to cena, still trying to press Khali as a main event heel, and Michael Cole going to raw to replace Jim Ross. We had an undercard with entertaining guys like Morrison and Miz doing their thing as a team, punk was getting overlooked but some progress was made at least, Jeff hardy got to the top in December, Jericho reinvented himself completely, edge shined as a top heel, mike adamle was so bad that we laughed in real time, kofi was getting over, they did Flair’s retirement angle, and legacy looked promising by the end of 2008. The show sorta felt like it had direction. It had plenty of problems, but at least it felt like they were trying to make an interesting show. I think the roster was mostly healthy too, so that was a plus. Compared to now, that may as well be 1997-98 quality.