A few days after my original posting, I saw some news articles about rumors that WN may announce a few months from now that they may move to assigned seating. This is one of many such articles: https://www.nbcchicago.com/news/loca...tices/3422109/.

For lots of reasons, it makes sense. As I said in my original posting, the main advantage of WN for me in years past, especially for short-haul flights, was the ability to change reservations without a fee and to be able to use unused funds on future flights. But now that the legacy carriers all offer this, and with my status on the legacy airlines, I also get a preferred assigned seat and early boarding as well, and at no additional cost (unlike increasingly less useful EBIC). Plus even if I or others were to check our bags, which we usually don't, there are lots of ways to get free bags on other carriers as well. So I suspect and even hope the rumors might be true. I would be happy for WN to modify their business model in order to remain a great company that also remains highly profitable.