Are you really all THAT inflexible? The airline understands you buy a ticket for ontime, safe transport. But come on... you all are road warriors! Think outside the box and be flexible. It's incredible to me that you're all surprised glitches happen and complain about it as if it's general practice to attempt to screw the passenger. There are a million decisions that take place to launch one single flight. Sometimes it really isn't all about the customer. While the customer is truly an important variable, there are many other pieces to the puzzle.
I don't think I or anyone else ever really implied that we are that inflexible. I didn't even TTU this. I wasn't happy yes, but I accept it comes with travelling a lot. If anything, I was more amused seeing a plane-numbered of pax walking towards my gate as I was going towards theirs.
I think the bigger reason I posted this was to invoke a productive insightful discussion on how NWA ops handles IRROPS like mechanicals and such. I think all the posters have managed to articulate some very good points. Particularly how they will inconvenience a certain % of pax, to lesser inconvenience another set. What decisions are made affects the overall CS impression NWA has.
Back to the original issue, I personally don't think the thrust really had much time impact, rather they knew the original SAN plane and now ours (MKE) would take another hour to depart, whereas our original plane was ready to go.