People who weren’t around probably forget that Baghdatis isn’t part of Federer’s generation, he was viewed as a top prospect coming up with the Djokodal generation. He was one year older than Nadal and 2 older than Djokovic. Until Djokovic’s septum surgery, Baggy was clearly ahead in results, and even once Nole was ascendant in 2007 Baggy stretched him to the limit at W07. The problem is he was he wasn’t focused, emotionally unstable on the court, and not serious about improving his game and fitness, so he faded quickly.
The story of Federer’s generation was also different than people seem to imply. It’s not that there was a Gen useless tier group of mugs talent wise. These guys like JCF, Safin, Nalby, Haas, Scud, etc either everyone had some major career derailing injury (JCF, Scud, Haas) or they weren’t serious about tennis (Nalby) or both (Safin). That left Roddick and Hewitt as the most successful of the generation besides Federer but they were more limited than a lot of the guys that came up with them in terms of skillset
Federer was also the first of 3 major beneficiaries of surface homogenization and court slowdowns because a lot of the talented guys his age grew up with different surfaces and courts.
I’m also firmly of the belief that the Djokodal generation is so successful because they learned to play without Poly but adopted it early enough to develop suitable games, and still had high swing weights. Gen useless and NextGen came up with progressively lower swing weights and poly and you see that it’s resulted in a number of weaknesses, most easily noticeable on ROS amongst most of the top prospects.