I stopped watching current wrestling because the product became stale and corporate. Everybody is the same. They look the same, they act the same, they wrestle the same style, their promos are all written by the same group of failed comedy writers. Everything is so organized. That's lame. Wrestling needs to be a little loose and spontaneous. We all know wrestling is fake but the emotion has always been real. With the WWE it is too sterile. The emotion is fake.
The Rock ain't a fake, so of course he runs circles around Cena. No writer came up with the idea of The Rock to speak in the third person and cock his eyebrow and talk about what The Rock is cookin'. That's all him. He came up with it. He came from the era where they didn't organize and write every little thing. The Rock was able to come up with his own promos and work his own matches. They provided some coaching and the obvious base storyline but the details were all him. In fact when he debuted he bombed as Rocky Maivia where he had a personality that the WWF created for him. He was corporate, sterile and fake so the fans rejected him. Later they let him be himself and he morphed into The Rock and became a star. And yet the WWE is so damn clueless they try to make new Rocks by following the Rocky Maivia mold. Steve Austin is the same way. They came up with The Ringmaster as his gimmick and it didn't take. Then he came up with the Stone Cold persona and came up with all that Austin 3:36 stuff himself in the spur of the moment in an improvised promo and away we go. The corporate control-freak route almost ruined the two biggest stars that saved the WWF from losing to WCW. If they went the route they go now they would have been out of business by 1999.
I'll bet a big reason The Rock ran circles around Cena is that they let him do his own shtick. I doubt he was reciting lines someone else wrote for him, he was being The Motherfuckin' Rock. Meanwhile John Cena is trying to make a comeback with the lame lines some hack writer (let's face it if you're a good writer, you wouldn't work for the WWE) came up for him and he's in over his head. John Cena ain't allowed to be John Cena.
And the funny thing is that since they let The Rock cut loose with his own material, they clearly have some understanding of his persona requiring him to be himself. And yet they don't allow that for new wrestlers. It's like they either don't trust the new guys, think of guys like The Rock as an exception and fail to realize that when wrestling was big that was the norm, or the common conspiracy theory is that the WWE doesn't want any one wrestler to be bigger than the WWE brand itself so they intentionally handcuff their younger talent.
And as long as this persists I will continue to not watch. The Rock alone can't bring me back because he'll just be a lone rose in a bouquet of plastic flowers. The core product has to change. And it won't unless they experience real competition from someone with money who GETS wrestling (ie: not TNA).