While I do see that more long-thin routes may help attract business for UA, I'm uncomfortable taking a shorter flight to connect to a long once-a-day flight where there's a high cost to missing the connection. Tried this once via EWR and found it quite stressful. I usually prefer to take my long flight to a big hub in the region that has more options to get to the final destination in case of a misconnect or cancellation. Therefore UA's 787 strategy will not be attractive to me until they start adding non-stops to new places I might want to visit from my home city (ORD).