NSF: I agree completely with your point regarding yields. Disregarding the human collateral damage, when you're scraping round the bottom of the barrel earning a quid a seat, moving to somewhere with comparable fixed costs or indeed where you have an exisiting infrastructure that lets you make a couple of quid a seat is a no-brainer.
I also appreciate your frustration at the sense of a missed opportunity at EMA. There are after all, economies of scale, so the reluctance to expand and invest would naturally condemn this place to the foot of the profit table.
Where I can't follow your argument is when you mention that crew utilisation is the problem. It's as if crew utilisation is an end in itself. It's not, it's a by-product of your operation.
You wouldn't go and eat more to get more use out of a toilet so you could declare it good value for money would you? You wouldn't drive your car round and round so it had a better cost of ownership to mileage ratio? So why fixate on crew utilisation?
It is no fault of the EMA crews that this irrelevant metric of utilisation is being used as an argument in their (I imagine) unpaid dispersal to who knows where. Their numbers were such I'm guessing as to adequately operate the schedule at their base. If crew utilisation is the problem then why didn't anyone lay more flights on? Because they were either not profitable or not profitable enough.
The aircraft will be moved somewhere new. Why? So that the aircraft can find somewhere cheap enough/profitable enough that allows these people to 900 hours a year?
If that is even a fraction of the rationale behind this then it is the tail wagging the dog.
And yes, it's barking.