5 things WWE got wrong this decade

#3 Unifying WWE Championship and World Heavyweight Championship

Randy Orton became the first-ever WWE World Heavyweight Champion in 2013.

As mentioned earlier, RAW and SmackDown should offer something different from each other. In the early half of this decade, WWE did nothing like that. There were no restrictions for Superstars to drift between brands whenever they wanted. Similar to how the wildcard rule stifled the sense of uniqueness RAW and SmackDown had to offer, these appearances from the same Superstars on both shows in the early 2010s was difficult to follow and could become tedious.

This was even more aggravated by the unification of the WWE Championship and World Heavyweight Championship. At TLC 2013, WWE Champion Randy Orton and World Heavyweight Champion John Cena clashed in a TLC match to unify the titles. Orton ultimately won the duel and unified the title.

From this moment, SmackDown mostly became a shorter version of RAW. The same Superstars cut the same promo on both RAW and SmackDown, and it became almost like a recap show, with rematches, and video packages of things that happened earlier that week on RAW. You would generally not miss anything even if you were to skip a few episodes of SmackDown during this period. If we remove our rose-tinted glasses and take a look back at this period, we would understand how dull SmackDown was until the return of the proper brand split and the move to Tuesday nights.