I mean, he was always just a generic fag, but he had that groundswell of support from shindie fans as well as WWE shilling the underdog story and on top of that making the le yes movement seem like some larger than life thing so he wasn't very easy to dislike unless you were a mega anti smark back then and the truth is those people hadn't reached the peak of their annoyance at that point so I don't think many people were anti smarks.
I don't really remember much of Daniel Bryan, as it's been 10 years since his first run and I largely skipped his second, but as far as the shindie wrestlers go his in ring stuff was very inoffensive and the same thing can be said about the rest of the early-mid 2000s indie guys, lots of moves you didn't usually see on WWE TV but they knew damn well how to work a real match unlike the sissies nowadays. Promo and character wise he was just bland and nothing special but, like I said, WWE knew how to sell it to you really well. From what I can remember, he was much improved in that department during his 2nd run. I don't really think that there's a need to revise history this much purely for the sake of console war points. Like I said, a lot of the early post WCW collapse indies guys were genuinely as good as they could be. Hell, CM Punk even made wrestling cool again for a couple of weeks and he remains one of the only real needle movers to come out of the 2010s.
