(04 Mar 2026, 7:47 pm)Andreos1 wrote But operators have had 30 years to take the risk and/or innovate.
The looming franchise agreement didn't exist back in the 80s or 90s.
There was no Kim McGuiness politics back in the 2000s and it was only in the 2010's, that QCS was mooted.
May be a bit of rose tinted memory here but to be fair I think in the 90s there was a fair bit of innovation, at least in terms of reacting to competition. Even the 00s now dont seem that bad - to me it was around the 2010s onwards when the stupid hub and spoke model became king and the networks were really decimated by cutting anything that wasnt a high freqency corridor into a hub. No idea how much of it was driven by the spectre of franchising/QCS/whever it was before that, but the timings certainly line up.