He's an incredible worker, but he really, really needs somebody more charismatic to carry him through storylines. At various times in his career that's been Kenny, Tanahashi, Nakamura. When he wasn't connected to any of those guys and had to stand on his own, you saw what happened.
But to be fair, he kinda got fucked by bad luck and the office too. Becoming champion during covid, being stuck being the face of that godawful unification and then dropping the unified title on his first defense. Those are some difficult circumstances for anybody to pull off.
