Well, I was in a middle seat on my last flight, but only because I switched to an earlier flight to actually get home at a reasonable hour.

My point in the post you quoted is that when "necessary" moving people around must happen. Because of the way seats are assigned it rarely is necessary. I understand moving a single passenger (my wife) from one window seat to another to put a pair next to each other, despite the fact that the new window seat actually was missing a window, the old one was arguably the best Y seat on the plane and the pair moved into the seats was ineligible to actually sit there.

CO doesn't randomly take elites and throw them in the back of the plane while putting non-status folks in those seats. And at the time my wife was non-status as well, so it was an even swap in their view.

Or would you rather babysit someone's kid because their parent was sitting somewhere else on the plane?