The very price sensitive customers like you are very numerous, but it’s the frequent price-insensitive business travelers that make up much more of the industry’s profits. So they care much more about the 5 million frequent business travelers, who do care about these things, than they do about the 500 million occasional travelers, half of whom have little to no profitability impact on the airline.

You're not the only one. I'd gladly stand on a short flight, say between LA and SFO or between Philly and Washington, DC. Those flights are faster than some subway rides, and no one complains about being crammed in to subway cars.

I was that way for a while, when I finally got the money to start traveling. It took about five or six round trip "knees cramped into the chair" style flights before I started realizing the extra leg room of an exit row or bigger seat was worth the 20-100$, or that landing at 5am wasn't worth the 35$ it saved me on a 200$ flight.

I don't know if I'm getting older or just my values are changing, but I stop thinking of the money spent and start simply enjoying more comfortable travel.

You might care about quality when you're in a 12+ hour flight.

I'm 6'6". Any air travel long than like an hour and a half is a cramped, claustrophobic hell. If I can find seats with more leg room, I take them. I'd also love more shoulder room - spending the whole flight trying to slouch as much as possible to stay out of people's way is no fun.

Obviously not. Many people do even while they bitch about the results. For myself, I clearly want quality up to some level of cost tradeoff. I rarely go for cheapest with respect to travel.