When taking a plane is cheaper and faster, something is wrong. I had the choice between a two times 5 hour train journey a few months ago or taking the plane for a journey from Berlin to Düsseldorf. We took the plane. It was cheaper than the train and it saved us spending money on a hotel. I didn't feel good about it. But the alternative was spending (at least) ten hours in a train.
There are two problems here. 1) why does it five hours with a "high speed" ICE train (avg. speed ~100km/hours, pathetic). 2) why is this so expensive that taking a plane is actually cheaper?
Deutsche Bahn is a good example of everything that is wrong in Germany. Inefficient, overstaffed, under performing, customer hostile, bad infrastructure, overpriced, too slow, and often failing to do its job entirely because of mechanical failures, poorly managed cascading failures resulting from other delays (trains waiting for each other and them piling up and causing more delays), or its staff going on strike every month or so.
It's not that they are lazy but they have a lot of people doing very unimportant things very poorly and not enough people doing the important things well. There's a lot of very comfy management that can't seem to manage anything. A bloated IT department responsible for making mediocre apps/websites (their payment system is absolute shit and UX disaster zone), and layers and layers of bureaucracy doing god knows what.
I've had some professional dealings with them as a startup without much success. Nobody you talk to can decide anything, they have a hopeless not invented here syndrome (they want to do everything in house and they just can't), and you are competing with professional grafters and consulting companies milking them for many millions for silly shit. It's easy to see how they are bleeding cash.