Pride catered way more to strikers whereas modern UFC cateres way more to wrestlers. I've fought in rings, circular cages, square cages, and octagon cages.

The thing with fighting in a ring is there's no way for a wrestler to grind you up against something. In a cage they have something they can just muscle you into to do their thing. The opposite is true with a square ring, because a striker can take the center of the ring and push you into corners. I'm much more of a kick boxer, for context. I can wrestle but not nearly as good as I can go toe to toe with someone.

Cro Cop too, despite being only a few years older than I am now, was a pretty tired man by that point. He'd lived a long life for someone that young. He had a famous quote saying he was thinking more about fishing than he was fighting. He went through some crazy shit with the fall of the Soviet Union too in terms of war. He was like ex-special forces and went through the downfall of the reds. So he was older than his age to be honest.

The problem with Pride was people with kick boxing backgrounds could school you if they played the rules right. The UFC is the opposite. If you can wrestle and use the three point rule (Randy Couture famously did this in Tim Sylvia fight when he came out of retirement. He put one hand on the ground with both legs planted and because he had three points on the ground Tim Sylvia couldn't knee his face into oblivion because of it. In a real fight Sylvia would have rearranged his face), you can navigate the rules in the UFC in a really unfair way.

There's obviously no way to do it correctly. People would start dying. I'd say a square cage would be the best way to even it out between strikers and mat rats though.