This idea of fighters not taking enough risks is just crazy to me and I honestly can't believe so many fans of the sport subscribe to it. I've said this before, but fighting is first and foremost a job for most of the people we root for. It's a job that carries a substantial amount of risk. Losing means you might lose your job. Getting wild means you might get injured and not be able to fight for awhile or that you might suffer longer term damage that you'll pay a major price for down the road. If you want to criticize fighters lack of willingness to expose themselves to that kind of risk, you're basically micromanaging how they do their job. Also, the technical level in MMA today is so high that some style and strategy matchups just don't produce slobberknockers.
I think the idea of fights needing to end in finishes or be "exciting" comes from 3 related factors.
1) Propaganda from early NHB that promised it would be a fight to the finish. Mostly this materialized because the early UFCs were squash matches with hand selected opponents that Royce easily finished. The first time there was actually a skill equilibrium, we were treated to one of the most boring matches of all time in Royce vs Shamrock. This was followed by the equally awful Shamrock vs. Taktarov, Taktarov vs. Ruas and of course Lewis vs. Carlson Gracie Jr. In fact, other than a handful of fights, most early UFC, Pride, Pancrase, and RINGS fights are unwatchable by today's standards. Once you had actual athletes with similar skill sets competing, snoozers ending in decisions were the default. Just thinking about Renzo vs Otsuka, Ito vs Inagaki or any fight involving Pat Miletich makes me want to take a nap. If we tabulated every fight in MMA history, we'd see finishes are the exception rather than the rule, particularly after 1995.
2) Lack of technical sophistication on the part of fans. This is sort of controversial because after all, it's supposed to be entertainment, so is it really on us as fans to know more or is it up to matchmakers and fighters to give us their most exciting show possible? In my view, few fighters go out and say "I'm going to do the least amount possible to just get a win." Few, if any, fighters train like this. In fact, it's very difficult to. Anyone who's ever trained in any combat sport or who's ever trained anyone knows you come up with a game plan to exploit your opponent's weakness and if the finish is there, you go for it. Sometimes we at home see openings fighters don't see or that they're too tired to jump on or that seem riskier from their point of view. There are definite cases where fighters will "play it safe," the best example maybe being Shogun vs. Machida 1 and some of Jones recent fights, but sometimes trainers and fighters have particular goals in fights where they want to focus on one particular strategy and impose it and it doesn't always go as planned. You can say they should get all of that done in sparring, but that's just not always possible. In boxing, fans came to accept this truth a long time ago and arguably it's made the sport more insular and niche, but not much more than soccer or hockey or for that matter American football. In the NBA the Pistons and Spurs used to be ruthlessly criticized for their style of play, and you could argue it led to rule changes to speed the game up and incentivize long ball. In MMA that's less possible because athletic commissions rather than promoters control the ruleset. Fans need to grow up. The worst fighter on the UFC roster today could likely dismantle several of the top fighters of 15 years ago in their prime because they have better technique on the feet and the ground, defensively and offensively. The boxing technique is still fairly primitive, but has improved by leaps and bounds today and is one of the reasons fights can sometimes be boring. People actually know how to not get hit much better than they used to.
3) Fans don't appreciate how bad the labor situation is for fighters. It should be said that nowhere in a fighter contract does it say they have to meet some arbitrary definition of exciting. It says they have to make weight, will be offered X number of fights for X amount of dollars and can be cut at any time for any reason, but can't leave of their own accord. Also, their likeness rights are gone forever and they can't have sponsors of their choosing. They are also prohibited from organizing to contest these rights based on the current position of the National Labor Relations Board, a position further complicated by the current US government's disposition toward foreign workers. You just can't "go out on your shield" because you never know if it's going to be the pretense for not having you come back. It's why in post-fight interviews you see that fighters take little solace in being told what a war they were in because losing sucks and could mean the difference between being able to pay the bills for the year. The UFC has tried incentivizing excitement with performance bonuses, but what happens if you're giving it your all against Kalib Starnes or a guy who's taking you down when you look best on your feet? Fighters can't control how exciting it is unless they script it and no one wants that.
In my view, if we want to do away with decisions and lessen the odds of boring fights, we should be advocating for more job stability, better pay, lifelong high quality health coverage and thoughtful rule changes at the athletic commission level that could pick things up a bit. More draws are probably a nonstarter because of all the reasons chronicled, but less punitive measures for losses would likely make people more open to experimenting occasionally. We as fans have to accept that this is no longer fighting or even the closest thing to it, if it ever was. It's a pro sport and finishes are one part of it, but they're the equivalent of a home run or a hat trick unless the matchmaker is a sadist. We're lucky we get them at all.