Historically speaking, the world champions tend to have better success over undercard champions anyways. It's a proper thing to do in seperating the dominance and status of the championship.
In this instance, TBS should be killing Hardy anyways. Fans can't buy TBS as a legitimate monster heel champion if he struggles to beat Jeff. It isn't 2002 where TBS was essentially a mid-card act. TBS is being put on a high level. Jeff's nature is to be high risk and that's exactly how the match played out.
It put over both workers and more importantly, the ECW Title.
Well ok you can make a solid point for that match, but over the past say 4-5 years they've shown they could really careless about anything that isn't the main title.