All I can hope for DB, Punk, Cena, Orton, Batista, Sheamus, Cesaro, Christian, etc., etc., etc. (yes, even Dolph Ziggler), is that there is an "endgame" plan in place.
A few months ago, there was a thread somewhere around here that asked the question, "Should WWE have an 'off season'?", to which I replied that it would be a good idea, not just for the health of the wrestlers (both mentally and physically), but also for the storylines. I actually proposed a rather complicated suggestion of returning to a brand split that would allow "Raw" to break between Wrestlemania and Summerslam and Smackdown to break between Summerslam and Survivor Series. This is one of the reasons I suggested that.
The storylines in modern pro wrestling are very complex and they have to be. This isn't because people today are smarter on average than they were in the 1930's or 1950's (in fact, I would argue quite the opposite in terms of pure intelligence). It's because WWE and TNA (and to a slightly lesser extent other pro wrestling promotions) have a national audience. In the 1940's, Gorgeous George could wrestle Lou Thesz in Los Angeles on Sunday night, in San Diego on Monday night, in Phoenix on Tuesday night, and in El Paso on Thursday night, and they could wrestle the exact same match, with the exact same conclusion and the exact same spots and nobody but them (and their travelling companions) would be the wiser. Today, if Daniel Bryan wrestles Kane on Monday night, it's nationally broadcast, and, if we get the same match on Tuesday night, Thursday night, and Friday night, people get bored and start bitching. This means that the feuds have to stay fresh and so do the matches. Even house show matches are (surreptitiously) recorded and the results become well-known within minutes of their endings. What this constant freshness (combined as it is with different feuds being in different places at the same time) means is that it becomes difficult from a writing standpoint to have as definitive an ending to a feud as there once was. Having "off-seasons" would allow definitive endings to feuds. Are you taking your break after Wrestlemania? Then, your feud has to end at Wrestlemania, because most fans aren't going to keep thinking about the feud while the off-season is going on. Sure, cliff hangers are fine on occasion, but they could easily become overused and tiresome.
What this has to do with the current DB situation is that we see that DB has been hosed since Summerslam. If he had come in in August, been set up for that Summerslam match, gotten screwed again and again, it would be obvious to any writer worth paying that the big title win for DB would be at Wrestlemania. Unfortunately, that apparently is not going to be the case, not because Batista and Orton are "destined" to be the main event at Mania, but because there has to be thought given to what happens after Mania. Due to those considerations, we're going to have to wait for the big DB title win. Don't get me wrong: HHH is a "main event player", even though he hasn't wrestled regularly in years and his role has been mainly non-physical, and a match between HHH and DB is a big deal and will most likely carry a "main event" moniker. It's just not the big deal that DB fans (and apparently most of the WWE Universe) want to see.
Bryan told us to tell WWE what we want. Since they're just as likely to look here for our opinions as anyplace else, this is as good a place as any to do that.
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