As a matter of interest, does anyone have any statistics as to how many pax miss flights as a result of delays in processing them through the airport and what proportion of flights is delayed as a result? It must be a nightmare for an airline to be say, a dozen SLF short at the gate and not knowing where to look to find them.
Take the point about the cutlery, striperalla, (haven't eaten there for a while
) but this fact can't have been communicated to all the airlines who still use the bendy stuff when coming into LHR. Other airports have either relaxed this requirement for airlines, or never implemented it in the first place (like Singapore).
As for the gate vs centralised security, I would suggest that you probably haven't travelled through an airport that uses the "gate" method lately either - touche!