Seats on BA can be booked for free within 24 hours of departure. The fee applies only if you wish to reserve a seat earlier than that
Yes, I knew that but my response was unclear. By 24 hours before departure the DCS will have nabbed most of the unreserved seats and anyone leaving their request until that time will end up with the worst seats on the aircraft, assuming of course that it's full.
Perhaps as more and more people vote with their credit cards and stop using BA, it will be forced to reconsider this decision. I imagine that the events of the last week or so will not have been good
PR for them, although I accept that there is a valid point of view that they made a better decision by cancelling all flights than the airlines who operated some and then ran into problems.