Hey Clarrie,
Not trying to justify anything you have said.
After a recent o/s trip I travelled on a few different carriers, using staff travel and commercial tickets. I found it strange that for the first time in many years, at just about every port, every carrier weighed my cabin bag. Now if you are like me, my cabin bag weighs about 3.5 - 4 kilos empty, let alone with a laptop and some small changes of clothes etc. Needless to say they were all keen to have me reduce the weight of the cabin bag to the EXACT limit and if this meant going over on checked baggage and paying excess so be it.
As a driver, I initially thought ok, at least there is an attempt to try and get the weight of what is in the cabin closer to what is guessed. Then I thought, our company uses standard bag weights and pax weights so irregardless of whether or not they weigh and charge for excess baggage, it is NEVER shown as anything other than a standard weight in our load sheets. So that means that this is not an attempt to gain accurate weights for loading, but purely an attempt to gain more revenue by making money on checked luggage.
As I said, this happened in Oz and three overseas ports, with our national carrier and two others. So I fear it is a campaign of realising that they can make good coin out of those of us who carry significant cabin baggage.