Easyflier83,
Sorry for the delayed reply, I'm travelling at present and missed your reply. I am well aware that Manchester has a lot of services which have been sustained over many years. I'm also well aware that a large number of services to key cities have been lost, for many reasons, over the years. Mumbai, Delhi, Hong Kong, Luxembourg, Sydney, Kuala Lumpur, Cape Town, Dallas, Houston, Miami, Boston and Los Angeles to name a few have all come and gone for all sorts of reasons. Management since the mid 1990s seems to have had a fixation with certain parts, though not all, of the infrastructure and with trying to establish links to a number of cities, few of which have been achieved or, if achieved, sustained, rather than taking a much broader brush approach.
The influence of the Gulf States airlines with their dominance in providing connections to a vast range of destinations is a curate's egg in terms of the development of services to the Far East, Australia and South Africa.
Manchester has, in the nearly sixty years I've been following its fortunes, suffered from many problems, not least the blocking of routes by the national airlines from the 1950s through the late 1980s, government disinterest in anything north of Watford and nimbyism in the immediate area from people opposed to development who deliberately moved close to an established airport, use it regularly, but complain about noise and pollution.
The last thing it needs on top is a laissez faire approach to marketing and the development of services.