DC3 Dave, as I see it, the last year or two of Flybe saw a huge decline in the airline's standing with its regular flyers. Reliability was never brilliant but was then compounded by the pilot leave fiasco leading to mass flight cancellations. On the flights that did operate, Flybe set about trying to utterly p**s off passengers by zealous enforcement of a hand baggage policy that left many avoiding the airline on that basis alone. When they did fly, the Q400s were increasingly poor inside and that did not fill you with confidence about everything else.
Yes, Ryanair have similar baggage policies but at least they have been very consistent - you know what you're signing up to. With Flybe you just did not know if you'd be cancelled, delayed, or randomly raped and pillaged at the gate if your hand baggage was deemed fractionally too big according to baggage sizers and ground staff which seemed to vary by airport. Even if you made it through that obstacle course then you boarded a Q400, invariably got seat-moved as the aircraft was "trim sensitive" - whatever that means to the average punter - and subjected to a filthy, dog-eared and tatty cabin.
Through no fault of those on the front line, it turned into a shambles of an airline which you couldn't depend on to turn up on time or avoid a sense of trepidation every time you set out to fly with them. It needed a change of brand to shed itself of this image. It says it all that a certain CEO offhandedly waved away the cabin crew when she was politely asked on a Q400 one day to remove her iPhone headphones for the safety demonstration.
And someone somewhere thinks it's a good idea to put all this back in the sky under the same damaged brand as before. It would probably be an easier sell to put a branch of Ratners back on every high street.
I'm sure others have equally strong and possibly opposing views. But for me the "essential regional connectivity" that Flybe offered is now provided by others where it's truly needed, and the rest of this sorry mess is best left to an airline history book still to be written.