NXT 2.0: Short Term Pain For Long Term Gain or A Disaster Waiting to Happen?

Feels that whenever I talk about wrestling I end up starting with the statement of how AEW changed the wrestling business. While this is normally in a positive light one promotion which it had a negative impact would be NXT. From AEW's inception they were placed as WWE main line of attack a simple goal was established in take as many viewers from AEW and drive them off TV. Almost 3 years later and one company was driven off of Wednesday's and it wasn't AEW. With the hammering week in week out NXT first moved to Tuesday and as talent left/got released and ended up with AEW a change happened and as such NXT was in a sense rebooted into NXT 2.0. Done was the black and gold and the skulls and in their place was as many colours as possible which ended up giving me a headache when I tried to watch it. But I'm not here to discuss the overall product but the idea of changing it. 

NXT in its original format as a developmental didn't make sense. They were signing the best talent in the world and by the time they were going to the main roster a lot were near 40. It's not the long term talent factory that WWE needed. It could be argued that for WWE the current version of NXT works more for what they need. Vince and Triple H clearly had different ideas for what they wanted, Vince wants the larger then life characters while Triple H wanted the best wrestlers in the world and on its own NXT didn't make money and would likely have to hand out big money contracts especially to the likes of Samoa Joe and Shinsuke Nakamura due to their name value and for Nakamura for him to move from Japan to America. I imagine the likes of Bron Breakker and The Creed Brothers are a lot cheaper for WWE's bottom and and be it a company that likes mass releases to tout record profits the cheaper the better. 

Does this have drawbacks. Absolutely, as far as TV ratings NXT are around the 600,000 total views and while not Impact Wrestling terrible the average age of viewers is around 60+ years old which will raise concerns that the stars of tomorrow are not connecting with a younger audiences. I don't know if they do not see this as an issue or not but I would as time in NXT would be used as a good leg up to connect talent to a main roster audience which averages at minimum 1 million more viewers than NXT. 

The hiring strategy could prove disastrous if it goes wrong. The idea was to move away from indy wrestlers and to go to more sports stars, college American football, basket ball, athletics etc and train them from scratch in a WWE. While a concept that can make sense for WWE if everyone is trained in a WWE style it in their mind will make it easier to train it may limit match quality. Above that what if something goes wrong and these talents trained like robots what happens when they have to change course of have to step up suddenly to a bigger match position it has pros and cons but more then likely WWE won't be able to throw any talent into the deep end. 

In the end I cannot answer the question posed, the only people that know are WWE in the future. Arguably before we know the answer they could freak out and reset it again and we have NXT 3.0 you cannot tell with this company. I think for WWE overall this may be better if Vince has an eye on the hiring talents and how they are developing it may mean more success for main roster call ups but every talent I thought Vince would like the majority are no no longer in the company. We could end up with a very boring in ring product in the future for WWE where every match is the same style and feels the same or many rookie talents could swim where they are expect to sink. Regardless of everything WWE needs to think this through in detail to make sure this change will work long term for them as for the short term I don't think we will be able to measure the success.