As much as I absolutely understand the salt around the Drift being downgraded from soulmates in PR1 to basically a group chat in PR2, I can’t totally hate it for two reasons:
1) Look, the insane level of Drift compatibility needed to pilot a Jaeger is a huge liability for a war effort. It makes pilots literally irreplaceable because in addition to having all the smarts and skills necessary to be effective fighters they ALSO need to have a soulmate?? It’s just not sustainable. It makes perfect sense that as a Drift scientist, your first priority from a technological standpoint would be to find a way to reduce the quality of compatibility needed to Drift effectively from like 90+% down to something reasonable like 60%. Yes of course the original Drift compatibility numbers would be romanticized in pop culture, but in the same way that the skills of fighter pilots in WWI when it was all just a guy with some gears in a paper airplane cockpit with no computer assistance besides his own brains and guts being romanticized vs. pilots today who have ALL the computer-assisted technology so you don’t have to be a spatial and aeronautic, irreplaceable genius just to fly a plane. We love romanticizing those people but it’s not a practical, sustainable model for a war effort and you’d want to get away from it ASAP.
2) I just… *fist clench* really love the idea of Hermann being the one who helped reduce that necessary percentage, spending his whole career just going from biggest problem to biggest problem in the Pacific Rim world, solving Jaeger coding then the Breach then the Drift percentage and then deployment for Jaegers. I just love the idea of him looking at his Drift with Newt, now that Newt is distant and not speaking to him anymore and thinking, “The Drift isn’t all that. The Drift is heartbreak and abandonment. It’s losing people you can never replace. We need to bring these percentages down. We need to make it so acquaintances can Drift. We need to improve ourselves by finding new people who don’t matter quite as much to fill what we’ve lost in our life.” And just setting out to make it so the Drift is no longer this great love affair but is just another working relationship, because that’s all he was left with in the end.