>>15909183I would say that he always had a more limited appeal in America than in Japan, but by the time he landed in a national promotion in the US, he was plagued by injuries and sub-par creative so we never quite got to see what his actual ceiling was.
He had a similar issue as Cody in AEW in that he spent too much time putting other people over before TV audiences were even used to him as a top guy. By the time he actually won the world title he had basically been turned into a joke. Even though the last few months of his run on top coincided with the creative and drawing peak of the company and contained his best matches in AEW, he was clearly on his way out for surgery while Bryan and Punk were drawing all the attention. So it's really hard to say what could have been.
