Mike, I 100% get what you are saying. I work for a small company that is partly owned by a huge Japanese company. When our corporate overlords visit from Japan, they fly in ANA C, which I believe is due to a travel deal between the two. My company has no such arrangement, and I guess I'm lucky to be able to choose which airline I want to fly on. And I'm not an executive, I'm just a humble engineer.
But when I have to schlepp it across all those time zones, then take trains and/or buses for hours to get to our far-flung customer sites...I've had enough by the time I'm at the hotel. It's tough to see all those people in C and know that their companies paid for them to sit there and eat and drink and snooze, while I have to be content with E+ and "beef or pasta."
If I were signing the checks for my company, I'd think long and hard about how C-fare travel would affect the botom line. But I would also apply a little of what I learned in the military over the years: don't ask your subordinates to do anything you would not do yourself. And if I were the boss, I'd fly in C.