Yes, the Etihad flight I was on was early. But my point is that I have never had to wait for more than 10 minutes to get to a stand at any other world airport, only Manchester. And it has happened on several occasions.
Maybe I'm just lucky when I fly into other airports, but I certainly feel that luck evens itself out over a long period, so it's odd that I have only ever experienced lengthy delays at Manchester.
As I said in my original post, I have over 1 million miles under my belt so I don't believe I'm just picking on a single occurence of an issue and drawing an unfair conclusion.
I'm not here to bash MAN, just make an observation based upon a lot of experience. And certainly there was much anger amongst my fellow passengers, many of whom vowed never to fly into Ringway again - which was the main point of my post. We can all shrug our shoulders and say that it's reasonable to wait 49 minutes for a stand, but the customers on the flight didn't think so and will take their business elsewhere in the future. Which really, truly, breaks my heart. I love my city and my airport.