the worst year? just because you didnt like some of the angles doesnt mean it was the worst, in fact the ratings prove otherwise. everyone has had bad ideas, you can harp on the negatives and i can write all the positives, the nation impersonation with dx, this is your life rock, the mankind winning the title, austin vs mcmahon, the corporation, i can do this all night too.
as for the ministry sucking, thats your opinion and youre entitled to it, but i and many many others thought the ministry was great, a ton better than the biker undertaker which followed after vince left.
if wwe was so great after russo left, why havent the ratings or ppv buyrates reflected that? its simple, wwe went back to the same old formula that they still do to this day.
The Ministry was just great. Especially the 90% of it being everyone trying to make Undertaker remember that he wasn't actually The Undertaker and his name was Mark. As you see, the storyline was Undertaker started to actually believe he was The Undertaker. That was interesting to you? I'll take Biker Taker over Mark believing he was The Undertaker any day.
I only listed a few things, the list could be much much longer. There was a lot of shit in 1999. I only remember this crap because I watched it recently due to a few knee surgeries and I needed stuff to do.
Do you remember anything other than the main events? 99% of everything other than the main events were horrible. Literally the entire undercard was usually painfully boring to sit through. If you really don't believe me, I suggest you go back and watch. It's a lot of fun. Also the interesting parts were due to interesting performers not Russo. Austin, Rock, HHH, Foley. Those guys didn't need writers.
Financially they were successful due to Austin (duh), the Monday Night Wars making wrestling incredibly popular in a way that cannot be duplicated and WCW being so bad by this time that anything WWE put out was automatically better and drew more fans.
Ever notice that the wrestling bubble popped with WCW dying? That is because the competition was gone. People who were solely WCW fans stopped watching. Causal fans that were interested by the Wars stopped watching. The bubble popped. Nothing WWE could do at that time would have kept the fans. The wrestling fad ended.
WWE cannot go back to that kind of interest because they cannot artificially recreate that interest. To be fair, the past few Wrestlemanias have had over a million buys or so. So it's not like the WWE is in despair. Could they be more popular than they are now? Probably. Could they be anywhere near the popularity they had during the Wars. No.
The best year of the AE was 2000 (the year after Russo left and to me, the best year product wise). 2001 was meh (invasion, Rock leaving and Austin being a heel really screwed that year). 1998 I don't really remember well enough to rate. But 1999 was just shit. Russo is trying to play victim and act like he only did a few things bad. That everyone was against him. Plain fact is, he sucked. He tries to hide it. He just happened to be in the right place at the right time.
When Austin came back he was actually interesting. The heel turn was a bad decision (as Austin later admitted). A big problem with that was, Rock left right after Austin turned heel. So in less than a week, WWE had lost their two biggest baby faces. That is not easy to replace. Plus injuries were catching up with Austin. The character was still interesting (him being Co-GMs with Bischoff being a good example) but his body could not handle the in ring stuff as well as he used too. Basically, 2001 was his last good year but the heel turn screwed it. By 2002 he was basically done.
Oh, and there's no doubt a number reasons why Austin walked twice but the idea that he walked because he didn't have Russo's ******ed programming isn't likely to be one of them.
