If you came across a boxer training himself by conditioning his hand for open palm strikes to the exclusion of everything else, you'd deride him as an idiot setting himself up for failure, and rightly so. Training for an activity requires drilling certain parts of what one can be expected to perform in a relatively safe environment until one can reliably pull them off without a coach or trainer or whataveyou guiding one by hand. The more realistic training is, the better results will be. Any drills based on unrealistic propositions is just a setup for failure, and that is exactly what NXT is.
This is a developmental branch that functions like a low budget indy wrestling federation, which attracts the most hardcore fans displaying indy darlings they have poached from organizations only known to the most obcessive wrestling audience. If they left it at that, there would not be a problem. The indy flippy shitters could continue to do their flips and flops and kicks and spots at will. However, this is still a developmental branch at the end of the day. The focus should be on using the show as a platform to advance onwards to the main shows.
Instead, the wrestlers that haven't had the dubious privilege of wrestling for over a decade in high school gyms in front of a dozen half-asleep neckbeards are given shitty gimmicks that only idiot smarks would like. They are expected to flip flop around under the tutelage of their trainers, rather than work a match the way they will be expected to do on the main shows. We have seen one of the most recent examples of a dead on arrival wrestler in Tyler Breeze, who took three years to graduate from NXT. What came out was an atrocious wrestler with a gimmick that only hipsters who masturbate to Steve Jobs bald spot could get behind.
However, he is only one blatant example. There are others who examplify the ineptitude of NXT as a developmental branch. Neville, a solid wrestler than can barely speak on the mic. The Ascension, who flopped comically hard. Roman Reigns, who was brought up as green as my cat's piss when he suffered from a kidney infection and to this day is mediocre at best on the mic. The Divas Revolution cast, atrocious wrestlers that can't have good matches on RAW and aren't particularly gifted on the mic either. The least said about the four members of the newest super jobber squad, the better. For every Rusev getting hot enough to warrant feeding the Cena monster, there's a dozen dead on arrival wrestlers who wouldn't make it on normal circumstances, let alone the WWE's creative cesspool.
The company doesn't know what it wants from their wrestlers in developmental, so they allow their brand to be defined by indy veterans who should either be focusing on adapting their performance style to the company's sports entertainment flavor, or signed up for the main shows instead of taking away the younger wrestlers' match time and conditioning the crowd to expect indy style performances from the show. A gimmick that gets over within a smark audience is not one that will ressonate with the casual viewers that are the WWE's core audience, and the proof is that ratings keep dropping as the product shifts more towards pointless workrate matches.
Now that the company has signed up a bunch of New Japan losers, I can only expect the trends I have mentioned here to get worse. My only hope is that these workrate losers bomb so hard, the company regains its senses and future endeavors them unto the bad straight to DVD kung fu movies they seem to have trained their whole lives to appear in. Or else wrestling will wither away until all that remains is a small minority of morons cheering at skinnyfat masochists assisting in each others' suicide in a dimly lit gym.
