Of course this is speculation - but should Yuna retire now - except for Korean fans - she will go down like a Tara, sarah and Shiz. Wondeful skater who won OGM and one WC.
Mao , a few years from now may be approaching Michelle's records - with two Olympic medals a possibilty along with 4-5 WC's.
So, it is fine to say Yuna had nothing to prove and this did not mean so much to her. Not a problems for me as I always respect Tara, Sarah and other skaters with 1-2 major titles.
Just strikes me that if it is a legacy Yuna wants - she needs to continue because it seems Mao is not going away and will surpass Yuna's records rather easily in the next season or two.
You do realize that Yu-na has the most world medals of any Olympic champion since Katerina Witt. I'm sorry but she doesn't deserve to be compared to Tara/Shiz/Oksana because Yu-na was competiting at an extremely high level for an entire quad.....
And the thing is that it is a lot easier for a skater to stay in the sport, when they have titles they'd still like to win, than it is for a skater to stay in the sport when they've already won everything. Who knows if Michelle Kwan would be a 5 time world champion if she won in Nagano. Its totally and utterly possible that Tara Lipinski (I saw believe her hip would have bothered her but still) would have ended up with more world titles than Michelle. I remember back then Michelle talked about how much she wanted to go to Harvard back then.
Not to mention, while multiple world titles are impressive, your also only as good as your best competition. Unless Nagasu really improves those jumps (and I'm not so sure) It doesn't look like Mao is going to exactly have a whole lot of competition until maybe some of the young Russian jumping beans get eligible. In contrast Yu-na had to beat Mao to win her titles. Its why Yagudin will always be a better for me than Plushenko even in terms of as a competitor because Yagudin had to beat Plushenko to win those titles. And in Plushenko's case for most of his career once Yagudin left-he just needed to skate clean.