ALDO aint even top 3 FW.
1. VOLKANOVSKI
2. Max Holloway
3 Conor mcgregor
4. Aldo
Lets compare wins...
Volk beaten : Max x3, Aldo, Yair, Ortega (honorable mentions Mendes, zombie)
Max : Aldo x2, Ortega, Pettis, Yair and Ortega (honorable mention Allen, Gaethje, swanson)
Conor : Max, dustin, Aldo, mendes, Alvarez.( honorable mention Diaz)
Aldo: Frankie, mendez, zombie, Swanson. (honorable mention Faber)
You dont get to be the GOAT of the division just because you defend your belt more times against taxi drivers, Aldo literally brought his belt from another organization and started defending it in the UFC.. if Conor, max and Alex were given the same opportunity they'd have 10+ defences. What matters is who has the better wins.
Also he lost to all three of those guys in his prime. Just because you lose to better fighters dont mean you're out of your prime all of a sudden. he was in his late 20s and early 30s when he lost to these guys.
in before you say, he had an early prime lol... he is still winning fights so clearly he isn't washed like Ferg or Woodley... he just lost to better fighters in his prime, nothing wrong with that.
The variable that you are missing here is that it is much easier to be a challenger to the title, rather than a long running champion, for the sole fact that when you are champion for any length of time, everyone in the division is training to beat the champ specifically, this is why # of title defenses is weighted so much. Further, when you are a champ, all of your fights and camps are for 5 rounds, which is much harder to train for and the camps are much more brutal. Virtually all of Aldo's fights were 5 rounders, except for a few at the beginning of his career. That's completely different than Conor, who had all 3 round fights until his title shot at FW.
Second, if you are going to count Conor's wins at higher weight classes, that means you also have to count his losses at higher weight classes, otherwise you are just cherry picking.
Last, you look back at the people Aldo beat and think they were 'taxi drivers', when they were the elite of the division at the time and also had significant win streaks before they faced Aldo, it makes it very apparent that you weren't a fan of MMA at the time, and are trying to piece things together using recency bias. Every new generation suffers from it, as we all remember and respect the best guys of when we became fans. 10 years from now people could easily look back at Conor, Volk, or Max, and question their wins of how good was their competition. You are making a very common mistake. I mean Faber is an 'honorable mention'? WTF? Faber was the GOAT FW before Aldo arrived. Faber went on a tear in KOTC and the WEC. WEC had the elite FWs in the world as the UFC didn't have those divisions until they bought them out.
Make no mistake, Aldo did something that is insanely difficult to do, and that was defend his title for many years. When everyone is dedicating all their time to studying you and beating you, when all your fights are 5 rounds, and the camps that go with it, and in a sport where inches matter and things can turn in an instant, Aldo successfully took on all comers and beat them.
What's sad about your commentary is you are placing Max and Connor on a pedestal for having beat Aldo, but then turn around and discredit Aldo as not being very good or beating a bunch of cans. If Aldo was never that good, as you contend, then Max and Connor's wins are naturally cheapened.