As someone somewhere else wrote, imagine if they'd done this to the Undertaker between 1995 and 2005. There were many, many points where they could have said, "Welp, we've explored every possible angle and gotten everything we can out of him. Time to cut him loose and move on." But they didn't. They took him off TV for a while and figured something out.

Now, they're supposedly more profitable than they've ever been, and they're cutting loose guys who've been loyal to them forever.