OK, I'll weigh in. Haven't noticed the quality going down, per se, but what has happened in the past few years seems to be a 'flattening out' of the experience as the airline has grown larger - so the more distinctive employees (and funny on-board announcements) are getting lost in a larger pool of 'ordinary' people; the 'push' to get people onboard quickly and to make a 20-minute turnaround that SAPMAN references is a lot more rare; and it's been ages since I've seen provisioning in the terminal for insanely late flights (at least the free drinks onboard policy is still pretty much intact)

Maybe I've been lucky, but my flights have been holding up pretty well - about the worst is that we're getting off from 5-20 minutes late, it seems, due to loads and incoming aircraft, but it's not nearly as bad as past summers (I used to fly a BWI-SDF that was a turnaround from MDW; it often competed with the 'late flight' (ISP-BWI-SDF) some 3 hours later to see which would get into SDF first). What I'm flying in, however, is generally a lot nicer than before - I don't miss the 'lounges' as much as I thought I would, and I had no problem moving on from the -200s. Also, the same network extension that can make timekeeping more difficult has given me a lot more choices out of BWI, which I've taken advantage of.

The issue about giving unrealistic departure times is well founded. Although it's easy enough to determine a 'real' time to expect your flight to get off, the current policy (showing overly optimistic arrival and then less than 20 min turnaround) is about as customer unfriendly as you can get. I don't understand why this is still going on.