Part of it I think is all the research into concussions and CTE that has been done means that some wrestling fans now think it's OK to idolise him again.
Like the third season of NXT was designed to get Kaval over? I think with both Punk and Bryan, earlier on in their WWE tenures, there was a constant battle between the writers that were high on them and the man in charge who wasn't. Punk also had the problem that he had heat with some of the agents.
Really, Punk went through several patches of being badly mistreated by WWE from September 2005 till he resigned with the company in the early summer of 2011. The same goes with Daniel Bryan until he got over as a cult figure at WrestleMania 28. The only reason WWE got their moneys worth with the two is that they were able to overcome all the attempted burials and bad booking due to their innate talent and confidence.
In the trailer to Sean Waltman's Timeline WWE 1994 shoot DVD, he tells a story about how he was shooting the shit with Vince, joking about bathroom humour, when Arnie (I guess Skaaland) jumped in and made a comment about Randy Savage and Vince's face turned sad and he almost went into tears. Um...
Meltzer said on his radio show that one of his editors told him to tone down the original story he had wrote for the Observer, which was bad enough to read.
There's a segment in the extras section of the DVD release where Nigel basically said the same thing, and reveals enough that it's clear his neurological problems were why he got out of the business.
The new ECW documentary has led to another online squabble between Dave Scherer and Wade Keller, after Keller posted an old 2006 Torch story about how PWTorch was unfairly scapegoated in WWE's book about the history of ECW.
IS WADE KELLER OF THE TORCH A LIAR?
NEW ECW DOCUMENTARY "Barbed Wire City" - Must-read supplemental Torch articles by Bruce Mitchell and Wade Keller on Kulas-New Jack incident (w/Addendum)
It's worth noting that the style change coincided with Nigel starting to work tours of Pro Wrestling NOAH, where you had Mitsuharu Misawa and Kenta Kobashi take insane risks on badly broken down bodies, so placing all the blame on Gabe and ROH would be unfair for that reason too.