Austin Aries only spent two years in WWE, starting off in NXT before moving up to the main roster as an announcer and later as a member of the 205 Live roster. He didn't have the best of runs overall, with a serious eye injury keeping him on the shelf for months and while he was treated well as part of the Cruiserweight division, no one really cares all that much about the smaller Superstars.
Aries' WrestleMania match against Neville was also left off the DVD and Blu-ray release of the show and it wasn't long after that that he was released. Well, despite recently claiming that he was let go because WWE's creative team had nothing for him, he's now revealed that it essentially boiled down to him being unhappy in the company (not making him the easiest person to work with).
"The truth behind why Austin Aries was fired isn’t because creative couldn’t find nothing for me, how do you not find something creative for Austin f*cking Aries? The truth is, I got let go because I probably deserved to be. They didn’t find anything for me because they didn’t want to find anything for me because I was f*cking miserable.
"I competed at WrestleMania 33, and I’m telling you, leading up to what should have been the biggest moment of my life, I couldn’t find an ounce of joy. That’s when I realized, there was something wrong with me. In six months, I lost my job. Relationships with people I cared about were tarnished."
Aries went on to say that he's going to start focusing on being a better person and now that he's realised he has some issues, he can "finally be free." All in all, it was a rather cryptic promo which only sheds a small amount of light on why he left WWE and there's probably still a little more to this story than meets the eye. Either way, he can now be found in various independent promotions!