Glassos - personally, my request satisfaction has increased since the introduction of Carmen. However there are plenty of guys winging about it, especially on the Boeing fleet. I suspect what has happened is that the guys who used to buck the system under the old "manual" rosters are now finding that they can't do so. Having said that, there are plenty of wrinkles that need ironing out, although a lot of them have to do with the interface between the day-to-day Crewing system, which still runs on 1980s software, and Carmen, which only deals with Rosters - in their infinite, penny-pinching wisdom our management only bought the Carmen Rostering module, not the Crewing module.
Having just reread your post I'll now try and answer your question! My days off etc have changed very little under Carmen - if anything I'm getting 1 or 2 per month more, but the number of times I get a requested trip assigned (which I find more important than days off) has increased noticeably. However, if I read your post correctly you guys used to use the line-bidding system before Carmen, which we never did, so I don't know if our experience is directly comparable.
Hope that's of some help.
t