What specifically about the presentation makes it feel indy to you?
To me the main thing with AEW are the weak storylines and lack of explanation when new guys show up.
It's too much "catering to the marks" and it's always on some "if you know, you know" type shit. Not everyone knows these indy guys already.
On indy shows you don't have to worry about long-term storytelling since it's usually just a one-off show.
It's good enough to just have the matches at an indy show without much of a storyline. That doesn't work for a weekly TV show.
If you want to grow your audience, you need to do more than just cater to the people who already fans and will watch no matter what.
I know they've pulled in 1m+ for the past couple of weeks and they've been patting themselves on the back over that, but that's still down from where they started when Dynamite first aired.
It's easy to just match up guys and put them in a match together, it's harder to tell a good story of how they got there.
Too many clearly visible pre-planned spots. I swear there's an outside dive in every match.
And this isn't about "but WWE does it too". Like them or not, WWE is established and isn't going anywhere.
AEW is still trying to establish itself for the long haul and become legitimate competition to the WWE.
Right now they're not, as much as people want them to be. Vince himself said recently he doesn't consider them to be legit competition.
Maybe he'll eat his words in a few years and I want AEW to be legit competition so the wrestling product overall can be better like it was in the 90s.
AEW has good young talent like Adam Page, Omega (although he can't cut a serious promo to save his life), Sammy Guevara, etc. but too many times they're put in stupid storylines and made to look like goofy cartoon characters. Something we've all complained that WWE does.