A long while back we were on initial approach for AUS and the headlight on the front landing gear didn't come on (we had already spent an hour in IAH getting it "fixed"). Rather than land at AUS we went back and landed at IAH so they could move us to a different plane and then fly us back to AUS. People were pretty upset, but mostly because it was 1am, and it seemed silly that they couldn't fix the light in AUS, as landing was going to happen either way. Of course, from CO's perspective, their maintenance facility is IAH, so for them to get a crew and spare parts out to actually fix the issue in the remote airport would have been very bad.