People have spoken with their wallets. The legacy carriers that traditionally had larger seats and more varied classes of service were eaten alive by budget carriers on Price.
I've never in my life seen a human-sized seat in Coach (in terms of width). I'd love to speak with my wallet for 2x2 seating on narrowbodies, but the asking price isn't reasonable -- typically 5x the price for business class, for less than double the space.
I still can't believe we don't have a "get your own armrest class" option with minimal additional legroom for (say) 50-75% extra cost.
Orders of magnitude increases in cost will never be acceptable to the average person, or even the spending-their-own-money 5%.
I travel for a profitable business, and there's no way in hell they're paying 5x extra for us plebes to have a little extra comfort. I imagine only executives and the consultant class get away with it.
I find Delta's Comfort+, Virgin's Premium Economy, and JetBlue's EvenMoreSpace to be quite a good compromise of price vs space. None are "private arm rest", but all are quite good fore and aft and my weight in lbs nearly overflows a uint8 and I'm comfortable side-to-side.
Comfort+ seems to be $99/way on trans-Atlantic and JetBlue's are $30-60 per leg on most flights.
I'm a (low) executive who probably could fly business class more (in the sense that our travel policy doesn't prevent it), but I choose not to as it's not a good use of shareholder funds. I only do it if it's <~$200 more or if I'm flying and going directly from the airport into a critical meeting. Routine travel and I'm fine in coach.
Can confirm, Delta's Comfort+ is "good enough" and depending on the aircraft United's EconomyPlus can be good enough, although I feel really sorry for the people who pay extra for EconomyPlus on those ERJ's. LOL. What a rip off.
6'5" @ 230 EconomyPlus on an ERJ gets you access to the bulkhead rows. Just wrapped 40 weeks of IAH-DSM on ancient ERJ's still sporting Continental cabin parts.
Yeah, have absolutely no need for a lie flat bed. Just "your own armrest" which I haven't really seen on many carriers, at least not domestic. I'm trying to swing Premium Economy on Lufthansa which looks nice, except I made the mistake of booking through United, so neither airline will take my money for an upgrade. sigh. Air NZ also has a good premium economy. That's all I ask. Sadly most domestic carriers only offer more legroom, which I don't much care about.
I have done SFO-DEL 3 times in last 6 months and on all 6 journeys, the plane was completely full - only one or two seats empty in economy. Half of the in-seat entertainment was broken (bad remotes/hung screens/broken USB ports) still people preferred a 15 hour journey over a connection, so I can attest to this first-hand
