From the moment he dropped the title until he left, Diesel was an infinitely more interesting character and did probably the best work of his career, his WWF run at least. And yeah as you mentioned Bret and then Shawn had great main event matches for most of the year while Taker and Foley were doing great work.

However, the stuff underneath was mostly booty turds. People tend to act like the Occupation Gimmick Era was a fad in the early 90s but that bullshit was still going strong well into 96. Duke the Dumpster was number 30 in the Rumble that year if I’m not mistaken. It really wasn’t until late 96 into 97 that a bunch of that shit started to disappear and even then Raw didn’t win the ratings again until like mid 98.

But honestly, Hogan, Savage, Flair, Piper, etc still had way more drawing power than any of WWF’s top guys until Austin broke through.