Earliest period where any of us are actually qualified to analyze their fights?

With the way that boxing has changed so drastically, I sometimes wonder whether our debating guys like Burns, Jeffries, Johnson, and maybe even Dempsey is just pointless. The early rules / conditions / techniques are different enough that we're critiquing stuff we've never seen live, done ourselves, or been taught in a gym.

We aren't playing the same game today. I'm strongly suspicious that there's a sizable minority of techniques we see on early film that we can't recognize because we *literally don't know what they're for, or why they're being done.* (I mean, they're broadly done to allow one guy to hurt the other guy, but the finer details of what they're trying to accomplish tactically aren't immediately apparent.) Some of the guys who left manuals behind explain their reasoning, but the techniques are not always straightforward. You wouldn't necessarily have guessed how things were supposed to work just from watching on film. And lots of them are different from each other, each with his own bizarro style.

I think Louis is about as early as you can get in the heavyweight division where things really begin making sense to a modern boxing fan.