Given the sheet amount of customers UAL carries, it's not at all surprising the vast majority of them have a trouble free experience. But a percentage where things go terribly wrong will wreak havoc on their reputation. We saw that latter portion escalate dramatically from both carriers pre-integration. Point is, just because there are many happy with UAL surely doesn't discount those who have good reason to feel the opposite.

I think a portion of th FT saga is the different cultures between the legacy CO and UAL forums. The former was smaller and less likely to engage in outright hostile complaints about the carrier, as the latter was. Integrate these two cultures, and add a disastrous integration led by a pmCO head, and the current rift isn't at all surprising. There were the apologists who CO (and the new company) gifted with status to influence their writings/blogs, and other 3rd parties who were either current or past employees of the company doing damage control from 2011-2013, but that snark seemed to have died down (not completely) given that they were invalidated by the current performance of the entity. pmUA had its collection of apologists, no doubt, but I never saw the same personalization of any jabs at the company from them, nor an obsession with discrediting this community as nothing more than a handful of disgruntled elites.