As a counter-factual, by the way, yesterday, I've had to book a late (early May) trip to the US in premium economy (the one cabin I dislike and almost never book) for two of us. I'm top tier with BA and AF which both had similar timings and connections and AF was about £200 cheaper. However, it only had seats in the middle block left on my days whilst BA still had a window-aisle/no neighbour pair in each direction. Guess which one I booked, and that was despite those being the last two tickets for sale in the cabin (now showing W0 E0 T0 after my purchase).

Now don't take me wrong - this is a zero sum game, so my relief to be able to find two seats I like in a full sold cabin as a GGL and (very unusually for me) highest bucket customer for one of the two ways symmetrically means that two people who booked their ticket earlier, albeit without status will be unhappy to find that they cannot get a window seat when they OLCI in a few days. Nevertheless, they 'could' have got those seats if they had valued them enough to pay for them.

If they chose not to, there is, perhaps, a logic in the choice that BA makes of who to please and who to disappoint that people can see even if they disagree with it. In this case, it happens on those occasions of a full cabin where of course, not everyone will have their ideal choice. Needless to say that in a much emptier cabin, even those who could not preselect will find seats that they will like anyway.