As far as I'm concerned, the grotesque sportsmanship from both Senna and Schumacher takes away from their greatness. Also I think you're underestimating Schumacher's natural talent bigtime. Schumacher was so dominant that he made his cars look better than they actually were.
Formula One (and indeed other forms of motorsport) have their share of insanely talented people but, Formula one, moreso than any prominent motorsport series is mostly about the car. There are eons of example of the best drivers becoming nothing once the car they are in under-performs, and vice versa too.
In 1999 when Michael Schumacher broke his leg mid-season at the British GP his team-mate Eddie Irvine took over the lead role in the team. Their ring-in driver Mika Salo waltzed to a sure win in his second race for the team (Germany) but gifted the win to Irvine on team orders near the end.
There are literally dozens of key races in F1 recent history (last 20 years) where the winning driver won by dint of teammate gifts or teammate spoiler actions (Irvine often held competitors back so Schumacher could drive off into the distance when his car wasn't the best it could be).
Conversely, some drivers are known to hustle and wring performance out of a car which most others could not. Senna was exactly that sort of driver. Schumacher, for all his insane success, was nohwere near as adept at that and he showed it many times in his career. His success once at Ferrari was
primarily due to the fact that most of the time he had the best car, or Bridgestone developed their tires with Ferrari so everyone else who used them had to guess how to engineer their suspension and steering attributes to get the best out of them (they were even long accused of supplying a better version of the tires to Ferrari on occasion despite it being against the rules). Moreso, a number of key times Ferrari themselves cheated blatantly only to have the rules either ignored, or changed in their favour under the threat from Ferrari's bosses that they would leave F1 if rule changes, and technical rules, weren't to their liking.
The first year Schumacher didn't have an obvious car advantage over the others, 2005, he announced his retirement mid-season. He was non-competitive (owing to the Michelin tires of other teams being vastly better than Ferrari's Bridgestones).
IMO, Senna was easily as good as Schumacher - his career was just tragically cut short. I would say most racing experts - most I've spoke to in decades off following F1 at least - would also say Alain Prost was as good a driver as Schumacher. His comparative lack of results can be attributed to much of the above - luck, or lack of, and also having to drive in an era when there were often genuinely 3 other teams on the grid who were competitive. Unlike the best years for Schumacher where the car was so good his virtually anonymous teammates were regularly 2nd or won races where he suffered misfortune.
Schumacher was so dominant that he made his cars look better than they actually were. The Ferrari was not dominant every year from 2000-2004.
Yeah. I don't think so. Other than in 2003 he won more than half the races in EVERY season he won with Ferrari. He waltzed home dozens of times against other cars which suffered mechanical issues (famously McLaren) or were well off the pace (nothing to do with Schumacher's driving skill). Senna's competition was such that only once ever did he win even half the races in a season (1988). The other times he won he was winning against highly competitive cars which could match or beat the McLaren for pace much of the time. In the anomaly season of 2003 the Ferrari was still, by far, the best on the low down-force circuits which Ferrari romped home to wins at. His nearest competitor won just 1 race in the championships to Schumacher's 6.
For a further example to show the flip-side of Schumacher's ability. When he came back to F1 in 2010 with Mercedes he joined sophomore Nico Rosberg who'd done relatively little in his F1 career prior to then. In the entire season he was out-qualified by Rosberg in 15 of 19 races. He was vastly outperformed for three straight years at Mercedes despite efforts and technical advantages over his teammate (which caused ruffles more than a few times).
