>>15089033Because everyone's being ironic now and no one's actually trying to book serious shows with angles and feuds like Gabe did.
And ROH was the perfect mix of styles which were all still sincere. It was people who watched Bret Hart and Roddy Piper as kids, were fans of Steve Austin or ECW as teens, and then got into stuff like King's Road and Noah once they stated wrestling themselves. That's who they were trying to imitate, genuine fucking wrestling.
Indie wrestlers these days want look like anime and wrestle not for 700 people in a packed building but for twitter clips and engagement.
Also the indies actually benefitted from the fact that early on WWE didn't actually think any of these guys could work and didn't poach as heavily. In 2005 Joe and Styles went to TNA (not exclusively at first), Punk to WWE and was almost fired again because they didn't know what to do with him, Bryan wasn't offered a contract at all, which is why he ended up being such a big deal for ROH for so long. If they'd bought up all the promising young guys and shoved them in their developmental ROH wouldn't have had that kind of talent to work with.
