Time

Scott-- Had some time to kill after and injury (long boring story), so I tracked down a bunch of your old RAW rants from 2002ish, and enjoyed the heck out of them (possibly because I hate Triple H, and his monopolizing of the show back then is eerily similar to his monopolizing of the show right now). However, it's weird how much things change in time. Booker and RVD both eventually got a title push, Goldust never really got rewarded for his work ethic, Batista amounted to something... But I think the biggest one has got to be Shawn. Near the end of 2002, you wrote; "Please, Shawn, go away and never come back again. The experiment is a FAILURE, you’re not over, you’re not putting people over, you’re not drawing ratings and you’re sure not drawing money at house shows. Enough. " Pretty much immediately after that, all he did was put guys over, pop ratings (WM23 had the best buyrate in recent memory, IIRC), yada yada. 
Which brings me to my point: do you think you can predict any things that we all believe now that will turn out to be totally wrong? Only one I can think of is that most of the IWC or Smarks or whatever don't seem to think Vince will ever pull the trigger on Daniel Bryan, but I figure a great worker who's over and friends with Shawn Michaels is pretty much guaranteed to get a push sooner or later, even if he's tiny and mediocre on the mic.

I’ve said many times that I was happy to be proven wrong about Shawn, although keep in mind that 2002 was a different situation with him.  When he came back originally he was working a very limited schedule, immediately got put in a top program with Hunter, and didn’t do anything to move numbers.  It took a couple of years for him to rebuild his legend status, basically starting a whole new career.  He actually took a couple of months off after dropping the World title back to HHH in late 2002, and it was the Jericho feud at WM that really gave him a fresh start and started him back up the ladder again.  Really, he’s a guy who built his career from the ground up to main eventer, TWICE. 

But I still don’t think that Bryan is ever getting a shot.