Why bury talent?

You've pretty much answered your own question there.

The weird thing is that it totally goes against the POINT of wrestling. There should never be a time, except in extreme circumstances with a final blowoff match, where you want one guy to look like a nothing loser. Your goal should always be to have both guys looking strong as possible. Look at, say, Kurt Angle v. Chris Benoit from Rumble 2003, where Benoit lost but came out of it a much bigger star. Now the mentality seems to be some sort of weird "robbing Peter to get Paul's heat back" thing. Like, for example, say they want to put Tensai over. So they'll have him go out and beat Ziggler (just like everyone else does). But then they realize "Wait, Ziggler's supposed to be our star, so let's put him over to give him his heat back." So he goes out on the next show and beats Kofi Kingston. And then they're like "Oh, we want to put the IC title on him eventually, so I guess we should give him a win" so Kofi goes out and beats Tensai in a quick match. And then the cycle begins again. That's the problem with all the 50/50 booking — they can't protect ANYONE outside of John Cena because instead of one person getting more over, you end up with 10 people looking like goofs, until you hit the bottom of the barrel with the Santinos, Ryders and 3MBs of the world being the only ones left who can do jobs without looking even more ridiculous. Even CM Punk, the friggin' WWE CHAMPION, gets caught up in this nonsense. They had him do a TV job for TENSAI. What did THAT lead to? Nothing, because it's just stuff that happens on TV and then gets forgotten about.

So to answer your question, no, there is no point in burying your own talent. In fact they should be going out of their way to act like every piece of talent is the most awesome guy ever, even if it gets a bit obnoxious at times. I'd rather have the problem of figuring out a finish for a match like Punk v. Ryback than watching 18 different guys with losing streak angles on RAW every week.