The reality...........
......er, excuse me, but as customers, the actual introduction of the 400 was a real pain. The lot that BA bought had real and continuous issues. Whether that was BA's re-engineering of everything, a habit which they now do a little bit less of, or the 400's fault, I do not know. In the early 90's you just could not guarantee getting from lhr to sin, let alone Mel, and from sin, to lhr, where BA had less capability, planes that I was on ended up
1. Nowhere. Could not take off, so had to get an SQ flight to Man
2. Athens.
3. Schiphol.
4. Somewhere in India. I didn't even get off to find out where we were.
For some strange reason, the 400 from hkg to lhr did not appear to give me the same grief.
The only upside of this was that I got to know BA's station manager at Sin and the passenger services supervisor, and had lots of interesting conversations about where we might end up. Was his name Ishahak?
Then, BA put their customer service in Sin in the hands of Quantas, so real customers who paid real money were always put third to 1. crew who were mates, and then crew who were not mates. Paying customers were not quite actively disliked - it just felt like it.
The only upside was that I did convince my 2 children that "real" planes had upstairs and downstairs. They could wear themselves out running up and down the stairs, and then the crew and I could sleep.