That makes sense of course. To me it is essentially an empirical question rather than one of principle (ie how "preferred heavy" does AF J tend to be?). If only, say 25% of the J cabin tends to be filled by the sort of people who can access the preferred seats, then AF is clearly being over-zealous. If, however, 70% of the cabin tends to be filled with eligible passengers, then AF's choice may make sense. I would say that to the extent that about 1/3 of the Y cabin is made of preferred seats, it is not entirely illogical to see 1/2 of the J cabin made of preferred seats too, and preferably the 'best' of them. The thing is, in the Y cabin, some families of 4 may prefer the central block, but with this new cabin, even travelling as a couple, I would see no point at all in choosing the two middle seats and would thus prefer to take two windows behind each other.

I completely understand your point about AF's current practice which tends to be about finding ways to charge people more or limit the advantages of some categories of passengers. Again, I fully agree with you on the general point and in fact don't doubt that this is the 'true' basis of the decision again. The reason why I dislike it a bit less this time is because I think that it will still directly benefit elite passengers who were so far often left with the bad seats in J. That said, I fully agree that there is a question of consistency, and if AF was going to introduce some preferred seating in J on the new planes, I don't see why they don't keep some preferred seating in the 'old J' too! Say, all the pair seats in the first cabin and maybe a couple of rows of seat trios at the front. would make sense to me but at this stage I think that there are none, and that is simply incoherent.