Yeah maybe I am being a little hard on him, but let's be honest, he wasn't really top 10. Don't get me wrong, I love watching Aoki fight, he's extremely talented and he was definitely a top 10-20 guy during his strong run from like 2007-2010, not a decade, but Hansen, JZ, Shaolin, those are journeymen. He was never able to step up and beat guys like Sakurai who was a true elite fighter that had success against the best of the best. The problem is that the DREAM fighters had little to no crossover with UFC guys in the post-Pride era, so a proper comparison of skill was never made and thus international rankings back then made little sense. At least Pride had some crossover with UFC, with Coleman, Liddell, Dan Henderson, Mark Kerr, etc so you could form some sort of judgment, but DREAM didn't have that and thus the rankings of Aoki were nonsensical.
I mean let's look at top lightweights in 2008-2010; DREAM had Shaolin, JZ, Hansen, Aoki, Alvarez and Kawajiri. Meanwhile, UFC had BJ, Florian, Sherk, Sanchez, Edgar, Maynard, Stevenson, Tyson Griffin, Guida, Diaz, Tibau, Lauzon, Pearson, Dos Anjos, etc. Then you had Melendez, Thomson floating around in Strikeforce. I would confidently say that not a single one of those DREAM guys would ever defeat a single one of those UFC guys, not even a chance. Maybe Alvarez, since he could actually wrestle and could nullify some of the lesser tier guys like, but there's no way those DREAM guys could beat a single top 10 UFC guy. I mean you think someone like Hansen could take on even a Clay Guida, who was a fringe top 10 UFC Lightweight? Or even a Joe Lauzon? Diaz? There's just no chance. Those guys would get absolutely massacred by any of the top 15 UFC guys, and Aoki beating a few of them just isn't as impressive as people pretend.