Seeing the voting stats, Ryan doing that bad after all and wasn't in the bottom 2 in several occassions after all (only the week he left and Week 2) and he started gaining a fanbase after halloween week. He was even a percent away than Emily in week 5 and received more votes than Honey G in his last week. If he was given a fair shot by the producer and wasn't sabotaged and given better performance slots (better than opening the show every week) and much better song and production, could he make it farther than sixth (like the semis/finals)

*I actually think the winner's song was more suited to Emily/Ryan than Matt.

With the right music and lots of promotion, anyone could be a star imo. It's all up to the record label at the end of the day and how much effort they put in.

If Olly Murs can do it then no reason Ryan couldn't either with the right backing. He's a good looking lad with decent stage presence for someone of his limited experience.

no matter what I don't think he'dve ever progressed from as far as he got, I think when he went he had reached as far as he was going to go wheras Honey G had a bit more left

If he DID get enough backing from the producer, he might last longer than he did. However I think, he was a back up winner in case Matt started drifting off (like Andrea on S11), however he didn't which meant the producer didn't needed him and let him go.

I think with Ryan if they'd made him more like a mix of Ryan Tedder meets James Bay I think he could've come about 3rd or 4th, I don't think that he'd have won because his vocal wasn't great, and Pop Rock is highly controversial on Talent Shows, but he would've had a bigger fanbase out of it than the weird boyband reject thing that the show was going for at the beginning of the show.

I do think he often looked the most comfortable and charismatic on stage alongside Saara. He clearly has better performance skills than Matt, for instance. His weakness is obviously his vocal, which is pretty limited, but given how much they (or indeed the voting audience) didn't seem to care about that with 5AM I'm not quite sure why he didn't get quite the same level of help. Well I am, they were deadset on pushing 5AM because they decided they wanted to launch a boyband of course. But yeah, you get my point.

I think he was pretty under-utilised, really. He was clearly never considered a contender but if he had been given current songs that suited his somewhat narrow range, as opposed to 50s songs that suited his narrow range, I think he could well have gained some momentum and come into his own.

I doubt he'd ever have challenged for the win. But as someone else has pointed out, he is comparable to Olly Murrs in terms of vocal ability, and his commercial success hasn't exactly been inconvenienced.