Is the consensus here 2000-2015 the worst period for heavyweights ever?

The 50s were much worse.

 

Definitely not. Not even close. All the decades until Joe Louis era were much, much worse.

 

The HW scene of the 1880s and 1890s was mostly a handful of half-decent actual HWs fighting a bunch of fat MWs. That was another very poor era for HW boxing.

 

Absolutely not.
The already mentioned oldtimers period was laughable, and when you dig deeper in even the 60's you'll see that many of the guys fighting in the division were quite small cruiserweights by modern standards.
Just to put things in perspective, Ali who now is considered a small and mobile heavyweight like Usyk was famously outweighed less as 10 times in his entire career, it was the 70's when actual heavyweights arrived at the scene.
The 80's had a couple of big names for the HW division, in Tyson, Holmes and to a lesser extend Tucker and Spinks (a former LHW)... but then look beyond that, then there's quite the void. So it's even a toss-up there.
I remember the 80's as very exiting, but that was almost all due to Tyson and an enormous amount of hype, with the sign of the times playing a major part there.

 

No man. It wasn’t too bad

 

2015-2018 is worse.
Fury's "retirement" and comeback.
Wilder's reign...

 

I enjoyed the 2000-2015 period. Some people were bitter that the top heavyweights were no longer Americans, but we had Lewis, the Klitschkos, Ibragimov, Maskaev, Chagaev, Lyakhovich and others. The Americans like McCline and Rahman were better than people were saying, they were hated because they lost to non-Americans.

One problem from 2015 until recent years was the unwillingness of promoters to allow top heavyweights to fight each other - for example, Joshua and Wilder should have fought around 2018 or 2019.

 

Corbett defended title once in three and half year reign, Bob Fitzsimmons did nort defend title for 2 yr 3 months, Dempsey did not defend title for 3 yrs.

If you were judging state of the division on how often title defended, then the above periods were not great.

 

The 80's had A LOT of talent. I would even name the guys like Whiterspoon, Weaver, Dokes, Thomas, Coetzee and Berbick before Tucker, who is famous just for losing to Tyson and Lewis.

 

Don't forget Jess Willard - 3 years and 3 months without a title defence.

 

Kinda.

The problem with the period post-Lewis was, for much of it, there were clearly two top heavyweights - Vitali and Wlad.

If they weren't related, and actually fought each other two or three times to settle matters, I'm sure everyone would look at the era much differently.

Because most eras only have two or three really top guys anyway, and everyone else (except for the odd upset here and there) comes up a bit short. It was no different in that era.

What was different was the top two were brothers and for extended periods controlled all the belts. They wouldn't fight each other. If one lost, the other would come in to beat the victor in order to keep it all in the family, and they owned their promotion company so both got paid every time the other guy fought.

They just held a tight monopoly at the top. There was zero chance we'd ever see the two best fight. None. And it lasted for the better part of a decade or more. So, it was an incredibly frustrating period.

The top two fighters in a division don't tend to work together as partners, almost like a tag team, to freeze everyone else out. Once the top guys did start fighting each other, fans started having fun again.

But, as far as the boxers themselves, it wasn't the worst period,

 

Maybe 2005-2015.

2000-2003 had a bonafied ATG at the very top, 2 future ATG's and 2 older ATG's competing. 05-15 There was really one one ATG consistently competing. Everyone else was leagues below.

Also: I see a few saying the 50's, Didn't the 50's just casually have 5 ATG's competing all at the same time, fighting each other? Just curious, my wealth for those earlier decades admittedly isn't as great as the more contemporary ones.