NOW you have to check in your carry on. And waste time waiting for your bag at the baggage claim. If it even makes it. Your bag has much higher chance of being lost if checked in late.
And I actually like sitting in my window seat a lot more than at the gate.
Also, gate-checked luggage is given to you at the gate when you land. So no baggage claim.
Spend some time at the window seats at the gate looking at earlier flights and how gate-checked luggage is handled.
It gets thrown down this chute that drops hard some 20ft to the ground. It also gets very carelessly thrown in there, so a bunch of the bags miss the chute and just drop straight down to the concrete. If you had anything other than clothes in there, ouch! You'll get back a back full of destroyed fragments.
your unreason will become apparent when you check that bag and stroll completely unencumbered through the vast distances twixt curb and plane (x2 departure and arrival)
baggage claim really doesn't take that long, and you can come up with something zen to do for 5 or 10 minutes, make a phone call or two, talk to family or friends. Life is better when you stop inconveniencing yourself and creating a rat race when there isn't one. Let everyone around you fight over the overheads.
Sure. Just recently picked up my partner from SFO on a late night arrival. It tooke THREE HOURS for the bags to start arriving on the belt. Who knows why. Zero information given to the hundreds of angry people standing there. A very miserable time.
Yes, that's not typical, but it happens. If you carry your bags, it can't possibly ever happen.