Well, you have to consider the nature of some of today's fans. You can categorize them in various different groups if that's your thing.
There are still fans who're content to be fans and want enjoy the product. That doesn't mean that they enjoy everything that goes on or just buy into anything that WWE puts out, but these fans generally want to be and try to be entertained. Even though these fans are "smart", they don't dwell on it as much as others.
There are fans who've become "too smart" for their own. They're more concerned with analyzing everything they see, categorizing it and essentially playing armchair booker to enjoy it. These are fans who strike me as the most difficult to please because it's almost like they're more concerned with nitpicking at everything, looking for some fault in what's going on, focusing on it when they find it, often exaggerating the hell out of it when they find it and often grow to feel that they have some sort of special insight into what's good & what isn't that no one else except themselves & those who share their opinions possess. While we all enjoy our fantasy booking scenarios, this caliber of fan takes it much further and are just unrealistic at times; if WWE doesn't somehow follow their ideal scenarios to the letter, these fans tend to crap all over it.
There are fans who're very, very picky about who they want to like and who they don't. Not that there's anything wrong with having high standards, but these fans often have very, very specific traits that a wrestler has to have or they'll often shit all over them. For instance, a lot of these fans claim that they want wrestling characters to be broad and cover the entire spectrum, but that's not really how it is. For instance, look at how many times we've seen threads in which the OP, or others posting in said thread, basically want every wrestler, heel or face, to be this superhumanly tough, nearly unstoppable, godlike badass with no real moral center. A good portion of the time, this doesn't apply for all fans of this type but a good number, often dismiss a wrestler, a storyline or an angle without even giving it a chance; they've already made up their minds to dislike it no matter what on some sort of strange principle that often makes sense only to them.
There are fans who're also just unwilling to suspend disbelief to any appreciable degree, which is ironic when you consider that they're spending their time and money to watch a fictional fighting league comprised of men & women with exaggerated and/or fictional personas that engage in scripted feuds which culminate in choreographed fights in which the outcome is predetermined. These fans can be difficult to satisfy because, again, they have tastes that can be difficult to cater to in the traditional sense. For instance, many of these fans suspend disbelief enough to watch, yet they often root for the "bad guys" while crapping all over the "good guys" for various reasons. Some feel it makes them "edgy", some do it because it's what others around them are doing, some do it because they just flat out want to. For instance, 20 years ago, fans wouldn't have cheered for a calculating, opportunistic sociopathic heel like Kevin Owens while jeering a patriotic, all American "hero" babyface like John Cena.
Now, to one degree or another, all of these "types" can be applied to most fans. One thing I do think that a healthy majority of fans from every viewpoint, philosophy, taste, etc. have these days is that they're spoiled to some degree; it's not really just in wrestling, but in society as a whole because we've very much become a world where we want everything and we want it yesterday. We also seem to be just plain more pessimistic as a society as we seem to be ready, willing and more than able to focus more on negatives rather than positives. Whenever we see something good, some sort of story in the news or we hear about on social media that has a positive message, it's like it's gone and completely forgotten about in the blink of an eye; yet negatives continue to stay around and are put in front of us relentlessly day in and day out. Police officers accused to racial profiling, politicians raking each other through the mud, the latest celebrity feud over something one of them said about the other on Twitter or Facebook, etc. Not that some of that stuff doesn't warrant a lot of attention, it's just that there's an endless barrage of negativity that's always front & center of just about everything we do; whenever we hear about someone doing a good deed or helping out a charitable organization or what have you, somebody always has to make a negative comment asking what the ulterior motive is, what's this person getting out of it, etc. When it comes to WWE, it's pretty much the same thing as whenever something good goes down, whenever there's news of WWE joining forces with a charity or raising money for this cause or that cause, here come the haters. As far as the product itself, it seems that a number of fans want every promo to be golden, every feud to be something they talk about 10 years down the road, every match to be an epic encounter and every wrestler to be all things to all people. We want feuds to be stretched out longer with fewer ppvs so the matches feel bigger when they happen, yet it's not very long before we get the "I'm bored with Wrestler A vs. Wrestler B" threads and complaints after the program's been going on for a few months.
It's easier to be negative and critical, always has been. Historically speaking, it's always been easier to tear something down than to build it up whether it comes to just about anything and pro wrestling's no different.
