But it is. Anecdotally many here have posted about it. Customer service even told me as much.

DL employees have posted that compensation guidelines are more generous for airport issues for Medallions.

The fact is that many Medallions are HVCs and so they provide compensation commiserate to the value that person brings to their business. As they are a business and not a court to think theoretically as you have proposed.

Who's to say this person isn't an AA EXP who is thinking about switching. Or someone who recently changed jobs that is going to be flying 100k miles per year? It's just a crappy business practice. Not a courts way of thinking. But then again Airlines are probably bottom of the barrel when it comes to customer service so I guess it's expected.

Thought I would provide an update on this to clear things up.

I wrote Delta explaining everything that went on in detail. After a couple of weeks (since it takes up to 30 days for a response) I received an email. Due to the original flight delay that caused the rebooking on this flight (original was a nonstop from Rome to Atlanta, this was a connection through Amsterdam) and my changed arrival time in Atlanta this fell under level 3 of the European Union Regulation regarding compensation.

The IFE being an inconvenience wasn't really addressed in the email, other than an apology, but the flight change resulted in reimbursement of 600 Euro (about 690 dollars) in the form of a check. It was a welcome surprise as I forgot about the Union Regulations they have over in Europe. While the IFE problem wasn't necessarily addressed, the compensation in whole is welcome and justified. I'm closing this one down.

15K miles for no IFE on a domestic 767 - FA issued the miles on board via her hand held device.

They did the onboard compensation for me (that's what the email was about) but I only received 5k for an interational flight which I didn't think was appropriate compensation.

2 years ago I took KLM AMS->JFK. The IFE wasn't working for the first hour or so, then they rebooted the IFE and it worked fine for the rest of the flight. When we got off the plane at JFK the DL agents handed us a KLM letter apologizing for the non-working IFE and gave each passenger a $100 voucher.