Rickson faced Yoshinori Nishi, Yuki Nakai, Yoshihisa Yamamoto, Koichiro Kimura and of course, Masakatsu Funaki (if you think that Pride and Pancrase worked the same amount of fights, then Funaki's record is no less inherently suspect than Sakuraba, I'd presume). That's not a bad lineup at all; all of them were experienced, knowledgeable grapplers and all of them were champions of some form of submission grappling and also trained and proficient in striking. Koichiro Kimura was actually one of the most dominant no-gi grapplers of the time, one could argue, given that he was utterly dominant in Submission Arts Wrestling tournaments, which were virtually the only no-gi submission wrestling events of that time, other than Combat Wrestling and perhaps luta livre events in Brazil. He also won a Submission Arts Wrestling tournament that was essentially an MMA tournament, where open-handed striking and kicks were allowed.
Whatever you think of those guys, Rickson easily could have beaten guys who had no clue about submission grappling. Instead, around half of his fights are against those relatively few individuals who were devoted to the study of submission-grappling, some of whom actually were proficient in areas of the game that Rickson wasn't necessarily as versed in (Nakai had the butterfly guard that he was an early innovator of, Funaki had his use of K-guard, his standing submission entries and various transitions and his general use of leg attacks in general). And in Vale Tudo Japan, Rickson was also set to face Kenji Kawaguchi, Shooto's top light heavyweight, with the fight only getting derailed because Kawaguchi lost to Jan Lomulder in the first round.
Point is, Rickson did fight people who were more knowledgeable about than the vast majority of professional martial artists of his day, during a time when he could have easily spent the entirety of his career fighting guys with absolutely no submission grappling knowledge. I think he deserves some degree of credit for that.
