Completely agree.

As a matter of fact, I don’t think we’ve established the OP would in fact have misconnected as things played out (they boarded the IB flight and found out about a further delay so offloaded themselves) or that, had they thrown themselves at the mercy of FCC agents at Heathrow they wouldn’t have at least been rebooked. They were told by BA CR that they would be - it’s FT who advised that they wouldn’t. Plus the OP knew the risk both by own admission & because they started a new thread to ask.

I am not 100% sure (doubting myself) that OW’s policy has changed - would be interested to see a definitive answer on this.

What I’m trying to say, rather inelegantly, is from a customer’s point of view it doesn’t really matter if IB / AY / BA or A N Other pick up the bill. They could say, look, I’m a OW FF, flying on two back to back OW flights, I’m within the MCT, I have a choice, OW should offer seamless service so somebody somewhere could have helped me out. I’m not talking about legal entitlement, purely from a customer service point of view. Or what is the point of the OW alliance...I sympathise with that view - OW has lots of other benefits which I won’t list. As I say, though, it’s not been established that re booking wouldn’t have happened in Heathrow had the OP travelled, especially given what BA told them.

As for market forces / dumbing down, whether you see this as a good thing will probably ultimately come down to whether you subscribe to capitalist / free market principles or not!

It’s a very interesting debate in terms of where the industry is now, what customers do / don’t expect and the practical realities.