Big Pete, you've got to compare it to matches of the time. Where it was mostly fist fighting. As far as the Mr Perfect match goes, I believe Curt Hennig from memory had suffered quite a serious injury the night before, and it was highly doubted he was even going to compete. But still he did, realising how important for Bret Hart it was, them two being pretty much best friends. Thats why you don't see a conglomerate of Bret's signature technical moves.
Of the matches you nominate, Hakushi's matches have a couple of pretty wicked spots in them, one from Hakushi himself off the ropes and to the outside.
The Austin match was an absolute redneck classic for mine. Some of the chainwork in the Owen Hart matches was spectacular and fluid.
IMO some of the best matches were against Undertaker, Chris Benoit and Diesel. Nash and Undertaker couldn't throw a big spot to save themselves, but its the raw psychology of the match that defines Bret Hart. The story telling, the ability to make it all look believable. You don't have to have seen the storylines preceeding the match, you don't need the commentary - even without those two things you can understand what the story is, Hart has a great ability to put over his combatants strengths, weaknesses, even the raw personality of the opponent.
Thats a gift.
Needless to say, from watching him throughout his career he could have wrestled the same sort of Iron Man match that Angle/Benoit for instance worked, or he could work a lot of high spot matches against the masters of high spots, Pillman, Mysterio, Liger, Ultimo Dragon. Or he could fight a believable match against a non moving big object like Big Show, or Andre the Giant, or Undertaker, or Sid Vicious, or Rikishi. Whilst obviously he's not going to be able to do the bridging suplex there, or the forward russian legsweep, or the superplex against them, he'll still sell you a great story.
Thats an ability only a rare few have had. Put him against an Angle, or a Benoit, you'll get your 5 star moves - your vertical suplexes, your superplexes, your shoulder breakers, your back breakers, your various submission holds, your second rope elbow drops...
I honestly have to give a helluva lot of credit to both Bret Hart and Vince McMahon, they handled themselves so professionally in their discussions about various things, and you can tell there's still a lot of respect for Vinnie Mac as opposed to how he felt about WCW.
