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It's because of the Monday Night War. Before that you'd have to pay to see the NWA/WCW or WWF Championship defended. When WCW and WWF started running Saturday Night's Main Event and Clash of the Champions we started to get major matches for free, but still there was something special about it. You usually didn't get a huge blowoff, that was still reserved for PPV (ideally anyway). When the Monday Night War happened they used the titles as pawns to steal viewers from the other show. WCW was severely guilty of this. WCW lost the art of selling PPV and was soley focused on stealing Raw's viewers. How many meaningless WCW World Heavyweight Championship matches happened on Nitro, and how many title changes? The hot potato booking of the WCW Championship rubbed off on WWE when they started to lose ratings after the WCW Invasion went poorly. The brand split further diluted what was the "real" champion to the point that 15 years later we really don't care about THE BELT. We care about our "guy" having a good run that might give us nostalgia for the Hogan or Flair years.
As for the NWA World Heavyweight Championship, it was lost in the shuffle once WCW and WWF were the obvious main promotions in the US. It's true prestige died the day Shane Douglas threw it to the mat and rejected the NWA. I don't blame him, it was a great moment and it built ECW as something important. TNA attempted to maintain the imaginary prestige of the 10lbs of Gold by pretending that guys like Mike Rapada didn't have a run. The TNA years while better than the post WCW years, still mean't nothing, TNA was a crap promotion then and hot potatoed the belt to oblivikree.
I feel that the WWE Championship and the NWA World Heavyweight Championship are worth saving, and I do believe that can actually happen. You could argue that the WWE have done a decent job with building the importance of their main championships, but I don't feel they are at a point where a title match means "interest".
To me the brand split was wretched for the prestige of the WWE Championship. I was game for the Undisputed Champion running both shows, I still wish that was the direction.
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