I still hope that you would go to that floor and talk to some of the people who do know what they are doing. If you are a manager at GF then surely you must hear about who is good and who is not. Am I right? But upper management are also to blame for all this. MXP is a good example. When GF had to make a decision to drop FCO or MXP, the forecasting team recommended to keep FCO. They warned the upper management that if FCO was axed, MXP flights would have a maximum of 35% S.F. So, what happened? A.A. overruled the forecast and kept MXP, and it had indeed an average of 35% S.F. and was eventually dropped. Sad.
As for systems running themselves, there is no system in the world that can do that. Things change on a monthly/weekly basis. Things like revenues, passenger behavior, travel patterns, connections, etc... And systems need someone who can keep up with all these updates.
I do agree that the wrong person in charge of the systems(or one person operating a system while everyone else is ignorant) can cause havoc. That person you talk about was a manager and had tremendous power when it came to making decisions about yields, etc... Am I right? Any ideas what his qualifications were? If my memory serves, he was from Sabre. Sometimes, applying concepts from the U.S. or Europe do not apply to the ME region and hence he fell into trouble. But that is my take on it.