> has such a dearth of talent that they have to resort to this WWE-style entertainment to make a name for themselves

Nah that's not true. Boxing has a ton of talent, the problem is that it's a prize fighting game. Each boxer is an individual entrepreneur, they don't get a salary, they essentially get jobs like any freelancer in tech does. What that means is that they carefully try to build a record, a story, a brand. Look at Pacquiao, he won $50k for his second divisional world champion title. He fights maybe 2-3 times a year, and out of that $50k he has to fly his trainer, cutman, strength coach etc to the fight, rent a gym for a 10 week training camp and pay them for months, and pay prize fighting taxes. He may be left with a few thousand dollars a month. But after carefully building a brand, a story etc, he took another title fight earlier this year, he lost, and made more than $100 million.

This means each fighter avoids difficult fights because a record with multiple losses is like being a freelancer with a PUBLIC record of having failed to deliver multiple projects. Instead, you take smaller, easier projects with less risk, where you can overdeliver (KOs) and build a portfolio of 20-30 excellent performances. And then you cash out by making lots of money on difficult projects.

MMA or most sports for that matter aren't like that. In MMA you have a league system and you . You basically get a random draw in a cup and get ranked ahead if you win, and have to do mandatory matches against guys at your level. Or you get a random draw in a league and you end up matching everyone and the guy with the most points wins.

That exists in amateur boxing, and it's the reason why you see a lot of really great fighters fighting other great fighters. e.g. Mosley and Forrest didn't meet eachother as a pro for many years until they were both established. But as amateurs they fought each other long before.

That's why in MMA most guys get 20k to 500k. In boxing, most guys get next to nothing, even a top 20 p4p boxer in the world like Kell Brook makes just $200k fighting his best opponent yet in Shawn Porter, while two guys gross more than half a billion dollars in one night. Boxing is crazy like that. Most sports have one federation (e.g. Fifa, or the NBA, or NFL), boxing has tens of sanctioning bodies, and 4 major ones, each have multiple titles, even world titles (e.g. super world champ, champ, interim champ) per division, and there are 17 divisions. It's a crazy system and there's no way to bring financial sensibility into it like in amateur boxing, or professional sports outside of boxing. (e.g. the nr 1 football player in the world makes a 15m salary, but the average premier league player makes 3m a year. In boxing it's more like 200m vs 0.2m a year.)

That's why journeymen exist. To make money you need a promoter to organise the fight. And the promoter will never pit one talent in his stable against another talent in his stable because one has to lose which lowers the stock (and future earnings) of one of the talents. He also won't pit him against talent from another promoter, that's like one consultancy agency calling up another to cooperate and split the revenue, in reality that almost never happens as each agency wants to keep the money in house, especially when 1 agency has to lose. That's why journeymen exist, not because there is no talent, but because the only way to make money in boxing is to create records with few losses and overpowering performances, because boxers are prize fighters, not salaried, and they fight not under 1 federation, but for one of many different sanctioning bodies, whoever pays the most.

In short, it's not a lack of talent that causes journey men, not at all, it's the nature of pro boxing's prize fighting, which has matchmaking politics & economics completely different from most sports. MMA is not the exception, it's very much like all other sports in the world. Boxing is.