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See, none of these are actual arguments. They're a string of random observations.
Cejudo won BW weighing in as a bantamweight. He says he stepped into the ring at 146. Moraes, for example, rehydrating from 135 would have weighed about 148-150. So Moraes had a 2-4 pound advantage in the fight. That's very small compared to a difference of 20, 30, 35 pounds. And yet, Moraes actually looked significantly bigger, stronger in the fight, which only illustrates how large these even narrow margins are.
The dumb thing that you're not doing is recognizing that in order for a flyweight to qualify as a flyweight, he must cut down to 125 first and then fight one day out. Figueiredo at BW would murder Figueiredo at Fly because as a BW he would be able to rehydrate up to about 149 pounds and as a flyweight he can only rehydrate to around 138 pounds, so if he were to fight himself, Flyweight Figeuiredo would be significantly disadvantaged. It's not about walking weight. Both fighters are not going to be walking into the arena at walking weight, so walking weight is irrelevant. A lightweight would routinely be around 185 pounds, some bigger ones pushing 195 pounds, in terms of walking weight. But when they walk into the arena, they'd 170-173 pounds, that's all you can rehydrate in 24 hours. Allegedly BJ Penn walked around at 190 pounds, which sounds about right. And depending on the fight, he could have cut however much through exercise, through weight. He was famous for being against IV hydration, but IV is a form of rehydration. So he perhaps didn't step into the ring the full 10% above the weight limit, but again, we're talking about very small differences, a couple pounds. Frankie Edgar was the extreme example because he would walk into the ring potentially in the high 150s, maybe 155-160. While his opponents would be 10-15 pounds heavier (unless they were BJ Penn, who he fought twice). His two titles, one should note, were against Penn. And both fighters were at a relatively infant stage of weight cutting, which has drastically improved since. His opponents likely didn't walk in as heavy as current lightweights walk in. Changes to weight cutting techniques is what forced Edgar to move first from lightweight to featherweight, and then from featherweight to bantamweight. None of the fighters that Edgar fought back in the early UFC days, except for Benson Henderson who beat him twice, would be Lightweights now, due to the growth of weight cutting techniques. Most of them were out of the league very quickly, some moved down, all of them were far shorter and smaller than the current lightweight. Even BJ Penn eventually moved to Featherweight. But even Edgar, as supposedly extreme an example as he was, would have been only giving up 10-15 pounds because he didn't cut hard to get to 155.
Here we have an individual cutting to 125, and rehydrating up to 138, and an individual cutting to 155, and rehydrating up to 172. That's a 34 pound difference. That severely dwarfs even the 10-15 pound differentials, much less the likely 5-10 pounds that Penn would have given up, or the 2-4 pounds that Cejudo gave up to Moraes. I think the funny thing overall is that you're thinking back to all these memories you have of times when you thought one fighter was so much bigger than another, and when you actually break it down, those differentials were a small fraction of the differential we'd be talking about. In addition, the height of the average LW at the time was 5'8" or so, and now due to our improving techniques, the average has probably increased to 5'10", which proves even more of a reach advantage. 5'10" is now the average, in his entire stint in the UFC, Edgar never once fought a LW who was even as tall as the average of 5'10". So if you're trying to compare a guy at say 157 fighting someone at 167, 5'8", to someone at 138 fighting someone at 172, 5'10". It's nothing close.
