If usual organizational and behavioral economics apply, (and the core team is still there, though some may have switched positions) CX more likely than not will treat the sunk costs as something that matters. The reality is, given the past few challenging years, they have come up with an ok J product to catch up but not to lead with the competition. My concern is since Aria is neither good nor bad, there is no significant groundswell of dissatisfaction among passengers, therefore there is less incentive for CX to change significantly, which might implicitly mean they made a sub-optimal decision. The continual delay of 777-9 might also have constrained industry rate of innovations temporarily, which gave CX less urgency to deviate from Aria other than making seemingly patchwork improvements.

I suppose the core of source of dissatisfaction of Aria comes from HK-based passengers for now. I wonder how much growth CX is expecting from the mainland passengers in the coming years and for these mainland passengers, is Aria considered much better than the mainland China local competitive offerings, at least in the price-value proposition?