When the WWF first hit its hot streak they only had a two hour Raw to worry about each week. All resources could easily be focused on a concise package, WWF creative only had to think about scripting 8 hours of TV each month. Is it any wonder that feuds made more sense back then? The creative team had less work to do and more time to do it in. Compare that to nowadays and WWE creative have five hours TV to script in just one week - almost as many hours as they used to spend an entire month on. A contributing factor to the faltering Attitude Era was the October 1999 debut of Smackdown. It's partly the reason why Vince Russo left the company, believing that it was too much TV to be working on. You can knock Russo as much as you like, but it can't be denied that the WWF was firing on all cylinders with him leading creative. He was proved right that the addition of Smackdown was too much work, because within two years of its debut we had seen a decline in the WWF overall. Raw in particular was nowhere near as good and actually became WWE's inferior show for a while in 2002 to 2004. The Monday Night brand only improved in recent years because WWF basically abandoned Smackdown to an afterthought. The expansion of workload ultimately undermined the successful formula the WWF had been working on. Fans had too much wrestling on their plate and with falling standards of quality soon started abandoning ship.
