The relationship between customers and airlines has long been an adversarial chess game. In the pre-9/11 days when Gordon Bethune charged me $2300 for a last-minute coach ticket, he took advantage of me because he could. When a crafty mileage run vaults a customer into the Platinum zone for $600, he's taking advantage of the airline right back.

What's changed on FT is the relationships between customer types. Adepts sneer at amateurs. New contributors get flamed. You have greedy compensation chasers lining up against FTers with raging cases of Stockholm Syndrome (e.g. irrational sympathy for their captors) who can defend or rationalize the most egregious corporate acts. (Bizarrely, these defenses grow more fervent as airline service quality degenerates and the horror stories get worse. I think there must be a great academic study in that.)

I suppose this is inevitable as the FT base balloons from a core of adepts to reflect the public at large. To me the flying public has always been composed of two categories of people: those who understand the aircraft cabin is a a social community, and act to make it livable... and those who maximize their own "rights" or advantage at the expense of the community. FT used to be weighted toward the first category; today it is weighted toward the second.