I do think the 2.500 mile 'bags on time' has probably helped. It should give stations incentive not to screw up. That said, I find the priority handling to be fairly spotty. It is usually quite good at MSP, but bags are mostly pretty quick here anyway (though I get frustrated with how many concurrent flights sometimes get assigned to a single carousel, esp late at night when they *could* spread out but probably are skimping on labor).

At the other ends of many of my ex-MSP flights I'm unimpressed. Is that based on how the bags got loaded, in which case it's actually an MSP-ish issue? Or how the outstations unload and sort? I dunno, but the contrast is noticeable vs MSP inbound.