Airline customers care about price above all else. A price differential as low as $5 is enough to get people to switch flights, even if the pricier flight is better. It's utterly cut-throat.
Why do airlines cram people in so tightly you can barely breathe? Because that lets them shave dollars off the ticket price, which attracts customers from anyone who doesn't do this. Given the choice between a cheaper flight that's less comfortable, or one that's $5 more and has more room, people will choose the former.
Why do airlines not serve meals anymore unless they absolutely have to? Well, those meals aren't free. People will choose the meal-less flight for $5 less over the flight with a meal that costs slightly more.
Why does everybody charge for checked luggage now? Because it lets them shave the price of a ticket.
If people wanted comfort, good food, free luggage, and all that, we would have it. But what people want above all else is to pay less.
And actually, airlines have gotten pretty good at segmenting the market, which for their customers (us) means we can pretty much choose our own tradeoff there. You'd rather pay more money for a larger seat? Almost all of them let you do this now. You want a meal during your flight? Just about any suitably-long flight will have meals available for purchase. You want to check bags? Go for it, just pay for it.
I hate getting crammed into tiny airline seats (I'm 6'3" and barely fit) and all the rest... but every time I get on an airplane and pass those better seats, I remember that I'm just voting with my wallet here, and clearly I value the $100 or whatever it is more than the space.
This is interesting, I travel on a lot of different airlines, and I always go with the lowest-priced feasible option. However, I don't really see it as much of a choice between quality and price.
Why? Because I don't feel like I have any information about the quality of the service or level of comfort before the flight. A lot of the cheaper and mid-range budget airlines are pretty much like-for-like in terms of experience, reviews are always skewed towards the negative and therefore don't contain too much useful information (people very rarely go online to write a good review after a comfortable flight with a cheap airline, but they absolutely do go online to complain and vent when it's uncomfortable) and anyway I don't feel like it's worth the time and effort to dig through reviews and try to find out what exactly my experience will be like on one 3 hour budget flight vs another, considering the amounts involved are not massive. Obviously I do go off my own experience, but even this varies from flight to flight with the same airline.
There's a lot of noise, therefore usually the easiest way to feel like you're getting the best value is simply to spend the lowest amount possible, assuming the experience will not be different enough to make you wish you'd spent more. To be honest, I think this is a decent strategy. It's very rare I've taken a flight and wished I'd spent $20 more on another airline to get a better cheese and crackers and coffee or a slightly more comfortable seat. These aren't differences which really matter in the budget short flights market.
In other words, you appear to be in violent agreement.
To be fair though, I'm really saying that there isn't a source of such information, but even if there were, it might not much matter for most, myself included. If I don't regret not 'upgrading' after the fact, when I do have slightly better information, I probably wouldn't think it was worth it in advance either, even with perfect information.
I suppose it's true but it just seems so, so surreal.
I'm not sure how true this is; airline customers have convenient automated tools for optimizing price that don't provide facilities that easily let them specify and optimize for a balance of price with other factors.
There certainly is a significant preference for minimizing price, but I think that the apparent preference that manifests in the market is a result of the fact that (base ticket) price is unambiguously measurable, clearly and consistently available, and available to optimized by convenient, ubiquitous comparison tools.