i'm not certain that this is the point of the thread, but my favorite gimmick, in all honesty is the backflip.
yeah, it's put ryan in a neck brace, yeah it's garish and overdone. but you can't deny that 10.000 pounds of machine 40 feet in the air upside down isn't cool, even if it's been blown a little out of proportion of late, but i'm fairly certain that as gimmicks go, a backflip is far preferrible to chad fortune in lesbian's hair going "GET OUT OF HERE. THE ENGINE'S NONE OF YOUR BUISNESS"
lesser of several dozen evils i suppose