The best way to gauge this is to look at what this forum was like in the years BEFORE The Rock ever came back.
Haters were all, "Rock sold out", "he's a movie star, he'll never come back", "he used wrestling to make it in Hollywood" etc. People were adamant that Rock would NEVER EVER come back. It was a pipe dream, a fantasy.
Cut to February 7th, 2011 and Vince announces on RAW that next week the guest host of Wrestlemania will be revealed. The live crowd didn't seem interested, and there were stories that Vince was upset at the reaction for his announcement.
For a week, the likes of Bob Barker, Justin Bieber, Will Smith and others are rumoured to be the host. Bob Barker in particular seemed to be doing the most rounds in the rumour world.
Rocky starts a Facebook account and Twitter account on February 14th. On Facebook, he posts a picture of himself posing in the ring in 2000 and says "Get ready...DJ" and then people start getting excited/nervous/ready for a letdown. People HOPED it would be The Rock coming out on RAW but we knew not to trust WWE's "big" announcements because they usually failed to deliver.
I woke up at 4am on Tuesday morning in the UK to try and skim through RAW to see if The Rock showed up. I had a 14 hour shift that day but I had to know before I went to work.
John Cena opens the show and talks about the guest host, and there's a little "Rocky" chant that breaks out which Cena acknowledges. He casually says his pick is pretty "Rock solid" but at that point, probably due to tiredness, I didn't get what he was saying.
Cut to the end of the show....
As you can hear and see, that place literally exploded. That was 7 years of waiting and hoping he'd show up one day in the ring again. He came back in 2008 to induct his family into the Hall Of Fame, and he interacted with the crowd and got a great response but it wasn't the same as being live in the arena and walking down the aisle again. I swear to God, I jumped up and cheered in my house like a mad man.
The following week, when Rock is shown on screen the fans go nuts again even though he's not there. From what I've read, the weeks after his return shows sold out with fans hoping The Rock would show up. Twitter, Facebook and the general internet went mental when he returned. This forum was HILARIOUS when he came back.
Sceptics on here were like, "he'll host Mania and then he's gone...no way will he get physical because it will ruin his movie career". So, he gets physical on the go-home RAW from Chicago, at Mania and the post-Mania RAW.
Then, people were saying he would never ever wrestle again in a million years. Rock vs Cena is announced and then a few months later he wrestles in a tag match at Survivor Series. He faces Cena at Mania, eventually comes back and becomes champion in a feud with CM Punk and then puts over Cena in a rematch at Mania 29.
He perhaps didn't need to be champion and face Cena again because people weren't really that interested in a rematch. The Rock got the victory in Miami and it was the perfect Wrestlemania moment. But of course, Cena had to get his "win" back.
Sorry for rambling, but Rock coming back was such a huge deal for me. They did their best to ruin the whole thing by making the Rock/Cena feud all about Cena calling Rock out for not being full time and trying to make it seem like Rock didn't care. They tried their hardest to make Cena's popularity increase to make the match seem 50/50 but they tried it at the expense of Rock's popularity and the crowds each week were like "meh" whenever Cena started rambling about how he was there every night and Rock wasn't.
It SHOULD have been simple....two huge icons going at it on the grand stage. The story didn't need to any more complex than that but WWE did their best to ruin the whole thing.
Overall, I think Rock's return was VERY over. Although the crowds were mixed when he faced Punk earlier this year, there was barely ever any boos towards The Rock from 2011-2013 so I think it was a giant success.
