Well, it’s both limited flights to the east and limited flights to the QX destinations. YLW and EAT are each 2x or 3x daily to SEA; there are more SEA-NYC and SEA-WAS, and as many SEA-BOS flights. So the real issue is that AS doesn’t bank the hub in SEA. If you want connections to work with infrequent flights, you more or less have to bank. But as you and others note, both gate issues and the obvious desire to serve the local O&D traffic first take priority. But I suspect there’s not a ton of SEA-YLW O&D and nearly zero SEA-EAT O&D. (At EAT, the agents look and me funny when my final destination is SEA, usually on a stopover mandated by the crummy connecting schedules.)

This drives me crazy. I had a trip earlier this year where YLW-SEA-DCA was five minutes under the MCT, forcing me into an overnight layover.

My refrain: be careful about those statistics, as they represent first-stop traffic, not O&D traffic. So naturally connecting central hubs have far more first-stop traffic than transcons with much less onward connecting traffic. And my wild guess is that limited ATL traffic reflects limited O&D demand between SEA and the southeast as a region with specific exceptions like CHS (Boeing).

Yes, I agree that AS’s apparent priorities make sense. But it is annoying for those of us in cities with little or no air service other than QX to SEA. I’m well aware that EAT and YLW aren’t the center of the aviation universe!