When WN was a 200 plane operation instead of a 700 plane operation, they were considerably less scattered around the country. WN didn't start in Texas and then jump into NYC, SEA, BOS just because "OMG you can't get customers by just serving places people want to fly, you have to have hubs in lots of geographic locations".

It's a problem for you and other people in this thread that their model won't work for all your needs. But that's OK, AS can survive without being able to be a major. When you're 20% of the size of the majors, it's a fool's errand to pretend you're a major.

The advantage of expanding through adjacent geographical markets is AS already has a lot of CA traffic, because the Bay Area, LAX and SAN are all places that send a lot of PNW traffic and vice versa, so you can build on that (that's basically what WN did for 20ish years, and what AS was doing before the VX acquisition), instead of "hey, let's go to some random midcon market where we have no real mindshare and try to make a market out of nothing". That's basically what VX did in DAL- they even invested in NYC/WAS-DAL by throwing money into LGA/DCA slots. DAL wasn't a particularly strong market for VX (and those slots went away), and isn't a particularly strong market for AS five-ish years later (AS is trimming back some of their newer tries at DAL service).