LiquidLarry2GhostWF
Highwayman
Yes, the undercard in WWF was awful up until Jericho/Benoit/Malenko/Saturn/Guerrero made the jump over. Until then, you had a good group of tag teams, none of which were really established as singles performers, with the upper mid card saved only by the fact that there wasn't always room for some of the guys to be in the main event scene.
I think the Hardcore championship came about as a way to combat it.....truly gimmicky at times and that was also a reason they continually swapped the belts to different guys.
Hardcore Title was a truly awful gimmick. I never liked it. Never got into it. Was shit and it never got anybody over.
Looking through the list of champions...yup...never got a single guy over.
Maybe, in an alternate universe, if you kept the title on RVD or Raven or Al Snow...a former ECW guy that came over on the tail end of the Monday Night Wars or even after it and had the title for a while and had a string of defenses.
Instead, it was a gimmick title given to Foley and it never stopped being a joke championship, eventually leading to its awful gimmick stipulations that just made for really bad segments and transitions in the TV show.
Everyone that was involved with it, was seen as a joke at the time. And one of the major reasons the WWE mid-card was so bad at the time was because the mid-carders were always seen as a joke. Never given anything productive to do.