Hey, as long as we can agree that your post meant what it said, this is a question I can take up. Just on its face, the claim that one of the three best central midfielders of his generation is only 10% better in two of his strongest aspects than a player whose career peak was four years with a midtable Serie A side, and whose only career appearance for his national team came in a 2011 friendly, seems totally insane to me. I guess we'd have to come up with some sort of quasi-objective definition for what it means for one player to be a certain number of percentage points better than another, some sort of soccer WAR or something. But what percent better would you say Iniesta is than a guy like Andre Gomes? What percent better is Barça is than Atalanta (no Roma jokes please, it's too soon)? Atalanta than NYCFC? Maxi than Kwame Awuah? Seems to me there's a lot wider range here than you're acknowledging.
Or maybe the claim was that Iniesta's fallen off, which would lead us to Christopher's point.
Iniesta's decline has been strange in that it's had less to do with lost skill (obviously) or lost physical ability (he still plays a lot harder off the ball than most people assume, although only on limited minutes) than lost influence. He's unlucky that his prime coincided with Barcelona's shift away from the short-passing-and-counterpressing game where he's most effective to increasingly brutalist soccer under Tata, Luis Enrique, and Valverde. Losing Neymar as a left-side partner this year isolated him even more.
So I'm on board with the part of Midas's post that suggested however much better Iniesta is than Maxi, his talents wouldn't do NYCFC as much good as a team like Napoli. Think of it as a squad multiplier effect on our imaginary player ability percentage. He's a skill player built for combination passing, something he's still highly effective at, as we saw against Sevilla. It's just hard to find a team designed to take full advantage of that skillset, even at the Camp Nou. Much easier to go find a Chinese market for your family's wine business.