I've never understood why people don't primarily pick airlines based on flight frequency, service level you want to pay for, and pricing, but if everyone did that FT would be rather boring I suppose. The brick doesn't love you, so why love it? The salad days of doing TPA-ORD-JFK-MIA-SFO-LAX for $99 and boatloads of miles and elite status while you're a broke college student are behind us. You get what you pay for.

I don't have problems using Alaska but I'm SEA based. I happily defect to WN or DL, or even NK when it works for me, though. AS coach is about as good or better than anyone else's, considering UA and AA can squeeze you in to 30" coach and tiny lavs. Once AS starts the "pay us more to upgrade or get benefits" game I'm more likely to be a free agent- if everyone is racing to turn themselves into NK I might as well consider NK or (fill in the blank).

I don't have many complaints about AS operationally (see: DOT stats, and I don't check luggage either) and I find the whining about PDBs and F food to be mostly small beer, but I'm also not paying for F almost all of the time. Most of my flying is 2-3 hours where I don't really care if I get the upgrade. I've done OK on upgrades on longer flights. I almost certainly would rather have cocktails and better food at sea level than at 35,000 feet. Once I get to longer flights J or F is nice, but I'm mostly burning miles to do those flights... AS is OK for giving me options on that (along with UA/AV).