is everyone involved in aviation or airports trying their hardest to pi*s off the paying customer.........
It's a fair question; but the answer is a bit more complex.
The problem is increasingly poor training, in several respects, and a growing alientation between airport and airline staff and the paying passengers, all stemming for a growing contempt for the customer that starts at the top in airports and airlines.
Most junior passenger contact staff, ground services and aircrew, are not only not empowered to make the often very small adjustment needed to give a passenger what's needed to resolve a problem, they are not even aware of what could be done. Moreover they have been imbued with a culture of "mustn't let them get away with it".
Then there are managers who lay down absurd and silly rules that customers must obey, often totally unnecessary, and threaten staff with dismissal if they "let them get away with" ignoring them. As often as not these rules are all to do with the airline's convenience and not the customer's, and the customer can spot this a mile off.
Most passenger have been using airlines for a lot longer than many junior staff have been working for them. And yet staff seem to be trained to think that they have some unique knowledge, and must treat passengers as though they are mentally sub-normal.
Now you have a new phenonenum of flight deck crew becoming unnecessarily macho, at the drop of a hat, and throwing people off their aircraft; occasionally one suspects that they do this in the mistaken belief that they must "back up the cabin staff" regardless of whether the cabin staff have behaved sensibly. The case this thread is about illustrates that.
I have heard the cabin safety announcement about twice every 2 weeks, on average, since 1968, and I don't actually need to hear it again. It's not my job to look interested "as an example to others". So I don't need some teenager telling me it's "for my own good", in the tones of a primary school teaching assistant. I've been in one or two evacuations, not just the crew training one.
I think that the Airline series on TV has a lot to answer for; week after week it sent a message that passengers were people to be treated like idiots, especially by handling staff, and herded from A to B to suit the convenience of staff.
Another culprit is the "you get what you pay for" culture, which a lot of passengers actually believe means they should have no expectations, and which many staff interpret as "I don't have to treat you as a customer; I'll treat you like the cheapskate you are". You only have to read some of the threads in the CC forums to get a taste of that attitude.
It all boils down to pervasive contempt for the customer that is relatively new to the air transport industry. I would date its onset as about 1995.
The blame sits, as always, at the top. Junior staff are what their companies have made them. When BAA behaves with magnificent contempt by subjecting passengers to the hell they have to endure, because BAA thinks that they are stupid enough to be encouraged to buy over-priced tat and blocks all its terminals with shops selling that, how can anyone blame its staff for spicking up on the message "These People are Mugs", and behaving accordingly.
For God's sake, the door into the terminal from Customs in T1 at LHR is covered by a huge sign; "ARRIVALS SHOPPING", it says! And sure enough, when you get through it you have to negotiate shops selling stuff that you can buy at half the price in the High Street.
Sorry, got diverted there. No, people are not trying to p**s off the paying customer, they don't even know they're doing it. Rant over.