Of course it has. This isn't some sort of new revelation. To me personally, I started devalueing the title in my own mind during the Attitude era. The title changed hands pretty damn often and many time to completely random wrestlers. Yuo had guys that never went on to do anything important in the business or never win a world title. I know there have been guys like Honky Tonk Man and The Mountie that held the title and never went on to do anything, but up until the late nineties they were rare. You had performers, who though being incredibly over, were nothing more than obvious career midcarders. Guys like Road Dogg and Val Venis held the title , in Venis' case multiple times.
This is the time when there seemed to be the biggest discrepency between midcarders and main eventers. There seemed to be this little world, seperate fro the rest of the WWF where the midcarders resided. You had the aforementioned Road Dogg and Val Venis, Billy Gunn, X-Pac, Ken Shamrock, the Godfather and more. None of these men with the exception of maybe Shamrock were main event performers. Sure there was the occasional DX tag match but that's about it. Like I said, these guys were over. Based on character though, nothing more. They wouldn't have fit with the main event at the time. In the past you had Randy Savage, Shawn Michaels and Bret Hart who held the IC championship first and were pegged as being future world champions. It wasn't the same way with the IC champinos during the attitude era.
So yes, the title has lost most of it's significance. They are however doing a good job of making it matter again. They are introducing feuds over the title back into the picture and making the champion a focal point of the show much more often. The same could be said about the US Championship, but personally I think that particular title has gotten much more attention in the past couple of years.
