The Airline Industry is one of the few things, where the USA should learn from the rest of the western world. As a passenger, I passionately dislike to fly on any of the US Airlines, maybe with the exception of Jetblue. The service is virtually non existent, and the domestic business class travel is a total joke.
The irrational dumping of Ticket prices led to airline travel, being a commodity. Anyone in business knows, that commoditization means more volume with much less profitability. In this case, more volume means more queues and (sometimes rather unbearable) hassles at the airports.
The traditional high yield business passengers rather use private jets - fractionals, such as Netjets, etc. to move around - leaving the rest of the seats to low yield bargain seekers.
As the result the management has a volume driven objectives rather than Service driven. That's where the vicious cirle closes. More Volume, less business pax, less yield...the flight crews work more for less...and at the end, may even lose their jobs.
My guess is, that things will get much worse, before they get better. At least one or two of the majors has to close down for good, so to take some significant capacity out of the system.
Once the pricing power of the remaining airlines is restored, it should become better. It is true that then flying may not be accessible to everybody, but not everyone should be allowed to travel on Airplanes (IMHO).
Sometimes, less is more.