I was a senior in high school and in college for most of the New World Order/Austin era. The dorms were packed, no one was going out until that crap was over. We packed rooms to watch that stuff. Could not wait for the next one, argued over it and loved it. Orton does not carry that star power. He is great and I love him, but if I miss him I'm not going to get pissed. If I missed the New World Order or Austin I could not have a good night & neither could the other 20+ people that packed my dorm room every Monday night.
I think you hit the nail on the head by making this statement. Like yourself, I was also graduating high school and starting college, and like yourself, our common area in the dorm was packed with dozens of people on Monday nights. Frankly, they had a bigger tv than any single college student, so we watched Nitro and Raw on a massive 60-inch projection tv !!
But there's a point I think you're missing - the type of fan that watches wrestling these days. Some, like you or I, are diehards and won't change the channel no matter what happens. But most of those college kids stopped watching once the Attitude era ended. Now, the majority of wrestling fans are kids and that's where the WWE is losing ratings points.
Stick with me here for a second. I work in television and we get ratings for our newscasts on a daily basis so I have a pretty good understanding of how they work. Nielsen calculates ratings based on the number of tv's "tuned in" to your newscast based on "clicks". They happen at 10 minutes past the top of the hour, 20 minutes past and at the bottom of the hour. Repeat the process for the second half hour of a show if it's an hour program. Simply put, that means in order to receive a ratings click, you have to be in programming (not commercials) at the top of the hour, 10 after, 20 after, the 30 minute mark, the 40 minute mark and the fifty minute mark. This is why a network like USA or Spike allows the WWE to run past 11 o'clock - their highest rated show gets a "click" at 11:07 or whatever time Raw runs until.
But here's the main problem - kids don't necessarily factor in Nielsen ratings. Sure, mom and pops may have a meter box or their tv's may be on during Raw, but they're not really watching - kids are - and most kids these days have their own tv's in their bedrooms, computer rooms, offices, dens, etc... Kids don't always watch the same programming that mom and dad watch. Back in the day (early to mid '90's), if you wanted to watch Raw or Nitro, you had to watch it on your mom or dads tv, so the ratings were naturally higher.
The WWE is killing themselves by appealing to kids. That doesn't mean if they start appealing to adults again, ratings will go up. TV has changed in the past fifteen or twenty years. Now we have popular reality shows on every night. Popular crime and medical dramas. Major sporting events played every night of the week and broadcast on ESPN and ESPN2.
The WWE doesn't suffer from a lack of wrestling competition - it suffers from other quality tv programming that didn't necessarily exist 15 - 20 years ago. Go back and name a major, high profile tv show that was on Monday nights between 1990 and 2000. Now, there's Dancing with the Stars (ABC), Gossip Girl, One Tree Hill (CW), House & 24 (FOX), Big Bang Theory, Two & A Half Men, CSI Miami (CBS). These are some of the highest rated programs on tv and they're on Monday nights !!!
What Raw may need is a new night.