Embroiling WWF in legal quagmire worked as a strategy for WCW from ‘96 to ‘98. If WWF was dumb enough to give them something to work with in ‘99-‘00, it would have been something but WCW couldn’t stop tripping over their own foot and as future WWE great Eva Marie would say (quoting GoT probably) “Wolves don’t lose sleep over the opinions of sheep.”
I am curious at how competitive WCW was from the time Bischoff took over till when they signed Hogan and even up through when Nitro started. Obviously they bottomed out completely during the Watts era and ‘93 was real real bad but they had to have some sort of forward momentum to suggest that signing Hogan was a good idea. I mean the British Bulldog, Mean Gene, and Bobby Heenan signings were all precursors (heck, you might be able to make the case that Kip Frey signing Jesse Ventura and Jake the Snake were precursors too).
Or was it a case of it “Screw it, we can’t wait anymore. We have to sign Hogan or we’ll go out of business?” The deal that they gave Hogan at a career low point certainly stunk of desperation.