>>14504284A fairly significant portion of those on the all-time greats list are well known for being either cool heels or tweeners, to the point that it can feel a bit passé. Stone Cold, Hollywood Hogan and the NWO, all of DX, Bret Hart, Kurt Angle, the Rock, and that's just like 97 - 03/04, completely discounting others who came later and were incredibly over like Eddie Guerrero, CM Punk, Becky Lynch, mid-late 2010s Brock, Rhea, and like every member of the Shield at least once. It gets harder to do well the more time passes and the more people take on that tweener role to get over.
It's done frequently enough that it's not getting more fresh, where-as clear-cut babyfaces, especially well executed ones are much harder to come by, at least coming off of a ~15 year period where a face was chosen by the company and pushed incredibly strongly whether the fans want it or not. Prior to Cody the last faces that were so unambiguously over and loved, so far as I know, were Daniel Bryan and Rey Mysterio, so seeing a pure white meat babyface like Cody feels a lot fresher than another cool tweener character. This is barring the way tweeners shake-up the usual face-heel dynamic in-ring. If you put a tweener, face, and heel who are all on the same level of skill together, the tweener is probably going to have the best promo or build to a match when paired with one of the others due to an additional allowance of depth in their character work, but in-ring they will never ever be able to work a crowd as hard as a hot match-up between a face and heel.
