those of us that want to see a budget airline come to Manston, cant seem to get our act together.
Flightless,
With respect, budget airlines aren't remotely interested in whether you can "get your act together". They are only interested in whether they can make money.
I can't speak for individual EUjet routes, but taken as a whole the average loading over the route structure they operated rarely exceeded 40% (this was clearly demonstrated by the CAA statistics for Manston).
Also, passenger loads and passenger yields are quite different. With the greatest of respect to the people who worked at the airport and for the airline, cabin crew and dispatchers may be better informed than anyone about the number of passengers on board the aircraft, but unless you actually see the detailed financial breakdown of what they're paying vs what the costs are then you're not getting the full picture.
There are many lessons to be learnt from the EUjet debacle, which I don't propose to repeat. But the biggest one, unfortunately, is that Manston doesn't appear able to support a large scale budget airline base. I remember after EUjet folded there were confident predictions that other airlines, having seen what worked, would quickly move in to cherry pick the best routes. We're still waiting.
Jetscream IMO talks sense in describing a more modest proposal, based on a niche operation primarily serving the business traveller and starting with a limited number of routes. Even then, I wonder if sweeteners would be required to attract such an operator.