BOAC. With the greatest of respect to your undoubted wealth of experience and an appreciation of your admission that "not relevant in this thread" I find you make the comment to make point that you`ve been there and got the t` shirt. I too am a child of the uckers board and served back in 82. What I think you don`t have is the appreciation that self employed pilots today face the sack at a moments notice if they don`t toe exactly the line drawn by management. As most Ryanair pilots don`t post on here for fear of repercussions I wouldn`t be surprised to learn of tea and biscuits for landing at an alternate with an extra 15 minutes of fuel above legal minimums.
I can imagine the conversation... "shall we divert then?"...... "best leave it to the last minute, don`t want to get into trouble for diverting when someone behind us makes it in, besides, I`ve got a lucrative 4 sector day tomorrow and I can`t afford to night stop and miss out on that".