I still owe barty a rejoinder to the Atlanta tangent he asked about last week with the production shift, but yeah there's a lot of ways Wayne made the south Legitimate. Not so much 'big' but the problem was the scene was a lot of names being pushed out with few people being recognized as being worth of being emblematic of the genre. A stupid sort of 'legitimacy' but to put it in perspective, besides Outkast and to a much lesser and internalized degree Scarface, southern rappers weren't considered The Guy or The GOAT. In the West Coast you could argue Ice Cube, Tupac or whatever. East Coast: Kane, Biggie, Nas, Rakim, etc. etc. There hadn't been a southern rapper who was clearly supreme over the rest of the genre and that had symbolic value to allow people to admit the South was great. You weren't getting that even at the height of the crunk boom from guys like say Bohangon or Pastor Troy, they were novelties to a certain extent despite their incredible talents.
Another thing is the notion of being a consummate experimenter. Wayne is interesting in that there's at least a dozen rappers in my generation (maybe lesser Barty's at least directly, I think Barty's younger than me a little bit? (Yes I argue there's 3 year generations instead of 10-15 year generations, especially in the media/internet age)) who were really disparate but still had the insignia of Wayne on their psyche and approaches... Lil' B, Young Thug, Kendrick, Wiz Khalifa, Drakk of course... These are so v different but they have that relentlessness of approach to place themselves in as many situations sonically and culturally as possible that if you think about it not every rapper was as comfortable as doing. Would T.I., just as talented in my mind, a peer as a Southern Rapper of a certain age, been as mentally ready to make himself look like a Skateboarder to further try and scrape the edges of the nuclear family as a household name? Yes it was ultimately lame and no doubt fueled by commercial aspirations and the whole lost childhood thing to some degree, but there's a connection to the fact that Wayne was already just doing ANY and EVERY approach to rap he could consider reasonable.