manrow;
All of this dialogue is missing the priority that the captain's authority is constantly under pressure from outside sources, whether directly involved such as ATC, or extraneous persons desirous of being re-elected who inspire noise abatement take-off procedures and routings which are frankly not safety designed, and hence need rejecting as often as any responsible captain feels appropriate.
Thank you for picking this point up which is often lost in discussions of the mundane and, unfortunately, sometimes even lost to the responsible person in the left seat. That is indeed "where the buck stops" and it is that person alone who's decisions and actions will first be questioned. The captain can do anything he or she needs to do to keep passengers, aircraft and property safe. All they have to do is justify it afterwards.
The difficulty is, in my view, not enough captains know where the park brake is nor do they use the word, "no" often enough, and instead press on with someone else's agenda "because it worked the last time".
Most of the time it does indeed work because airline procedures are not haphazardly designed or taught nor is the industry so demanding that an operation is paralyzed by due process, (although we've all seen some pretty horrendous individual operations which we'd all like to forget!).
After all is safe in the judgement of the captain, airline captains also have a duty to their company to ensure that the company makes money,
within the bounds and requirements of flight safety.
Nor does any of this absolve the company officers right from the CEO/President on down to middle line management. If they are not doing their part in constantly asking the question, "Are we safe?", and ensuring that all employees know,
right from the top executive, that there is an active and vigilant intolerance for compromise in safety, then they may be creating a lax or dysfunctional safety culture and may become a "contributing cause" of an accident.
That said, every captain must work within a system which itself is necessarily a compromise due to volume, fleet types and route type, (domestic/international). As stated above, a captain can request, even demand a certain runway but it may cost a very long delay. One is then instantly in the larger framed discussion regarding the use of airspace and runway allocations. To remain a good neighbour, airports will have policies of rotating runways in appropriate wind conditions so that everyone "shares" in the noiseprint.
To enlarge the frame, local city/municipal governments will, in order to enhance tax bases, grant zoning requests, often for residential areas but industrial zoning as well, on airports' doorsteps. More compromise of limited land use. One could build a small city on the land an airport takes up and while the economic benefits are enormous, so are the costs.
From "captain to the mayor's chair" in a few quick paragraphs, but these are the extended realities which impinge on the decision-making process in every operational cockpit.