Grow Up People
Every time El Reg runs a Ryanair story we get comment threads like this.
The whole airline industry has more capacity than the economy can sensibly support at economic prices. The reasons for this are many and complex but it's a fact.
As a result airlines are unable to charge fares that enable them to make a return on capital invested while operating a "normal" service. The rational response to this would be for airlines to merge or go out of business but in practice that hardly ever happens and the industry continues with over-capacity.
So in one way or another airlines try to make so-called "ancillary revenue" to try to bridge the black hole in their finances. Ryanair is the best in the world at the ancillary revenue caper. Something like 25% of its revenues are ancillaries (That's from memory. If I were wider awake I woudl look it up.) Other airlines look at Ryanair as a leader in this respect but they don't have the sheer brass neck to take things quite as far.
In the end Ryanair is just doing more of what almost all airlines are doing less successfully. It is the most profitable airline in the world so it's hard to argue from a shareholder point of view that what it does is wrong. From the consumer point of view there is always the option of not flying with them.
In my personal experience Ryanair's on-time performance is better than Easyjet but where possible I avoid flying either of them. It's usually possible to fly with a more "traditional" airline for a little more money. Then it's a simple economic decision. Is the extra discomfort and annoyance with the ten or twenty quid I could save? For me the answer is usually no, but I fully understand why others may come to a different conclusion.