So it costs more and wastes my time? I can understand you doing it because you can, but how can it make sense economically or from a time management point of view?
Flying to Paris for a meeting:
Self Fly:
I have nearly 2 miles of WW2 tarmac 300yrds from my front door, time to aircraft if I walk 2 minutes. Preflight, 5 mins. Time to climb to 22,000ft cruise to Pontoise and land 55 mins. Taxi to Paris office 20 mins.
Total Time: 1:27 lets say 2hrs for dawdling time:
Commercial:
2:30hrs to Luton Airport, 2hrs before for check in, 1hr flight, 1hr trying to get out of the airport, 20 mins taxi ride.
Total Time: 6:20
To get the 8am flight involves me getting up at around 3:30am and will usually mean an overnight stop or getting home very late and then being knackered the next day.
The problem with the logic here is that you are trying to apply GA utility value to aircraft that were designed for a different purpose. With all due respect to Rod an MCR is not a utility GA aircraft, it is a fun Day VFR aircraft.
To get utility you have to look at the bigger end of the spam cans, TB's Cessna etc and that gives you a 50/50 chance of utility use. To improve that you go bigger, Malibu, 421 etc and that improves things even further and then beyond that TBM's and then into the light jets.
All GA and all able to be flown by private pilots. The big assumption here is that everyone in GA is grubbing around finding coppers to rub together to get airborne as cheaply as possible. GA represents a much larger scene, it is just a scale off cost.