Whilst I very much agree with this point, note that well-designed FFPs are also about more than just 'emotion' and 'logic', they are also about obfuscation / making the hard economic comparison itself difficult. For example, what exactly is access to either the First Wing or Galleries First worth to someone? Access to many First lounges is deliberately not sold even though doing so would maximise revenue generation from the lounge itself because the airline wants to maintain 'the halo' and for the lounge to be considered as a higher-end experience than it really is (they are almost all chain restaurants with nice alcohol at best that happen to be in an airport). The minute you put a price tag on it, this becomes the maximum value it could possibly be assigned in the customer's head: they can sit down and say, well, status must be worth at least £x multipled by the number of lounge visits I do per year to make this all worthwhile. Equally, when many airlines do sell lounge access directly they set it at a price which is clearly inflated vs. independent lounges beyond just the extra cost of better alcohol / food because of this consideration, e.g. EK selling business class access for $150-175 which will get virtually zero take up as the kind of people willing to pay this for lounge access will almost always already have a business class ticket.

This same calculation is also playing out here for BA status now. For the first time, lots of people are saying 'err, BA status now needs to be worth at least 'x', is that the case for me?', whereas in the past they were unable to do this calculation and it was more based on a warm fuzzy feeling from various benefits to which it was difficult to assign a monetary value. I imagine many passengers, particularly those outside the Flyertalk bubble, had no idea what they were even spending with BA or oneworld each year until BA has just made them sit down and do the calculation. The mitigation for this in the US is the airlines had already built up a loyalty ecosystem around themselves to lock the consumers in across credit cards etc. before they moved to revenue based which bumps up the value customers think they are getting and makes it more complex than just a simple 'I need to spend x on flights'. BA doesn't have this to quite the same extent yet, which is why this is all either a very brave and or a very stupid gamble to many of us.