> In which ways? Apart from the low cost part and making flying utterly miserable now. It's not like he invented a new type of airplane
I can only assume that you weren't around for the transition. Intra-EU flights cost multiples of the average industrial week's wages before Ryanair. Air travel was inaccessible or rarely accessible to the vast majority of people in the continent.
Ryanair single-handled brought the cost of European air fares down by two orders of magnitude and became the largest airline in the world by PAX to show for it. It absolutely revolutionised travel within Europe because it made point-to-point flights available to everyone, even the low-waged and students heading away for a city break with €20 return flights.
> A tight, business-savvy guy spent all his waking hours figuring out how to further screw passengers (and continues to do so)
And yet PAX love Ryanair, as evidenced by the ticket sales even though they love to complain. After all, for most people, the choice isn't between low-cost and full-service carriers. It's between low-cost carriers and not flying at all.
> Flag Carriers are all low-cost for short/mid haul now (and to an extent long-haul), as they've been dragged in to the gutter by Easyjet and Ryanair
Another perspective that's a lot closer to the truth is that Ryanair forced them to compete on price and actually serve the public which their flag purports to represent, but which the flag carriers completely ignored for most of their history.