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.
Except of course traffic is growing and deals have been struck with airlines like Ryanair, Easy, Jet2 to name but a few with frameworks to support further growth (subject of course to the prevailing economic circumstances). That's hardly 'laissez faire'.
I think too many of here are slightly obsessed with "direct long-haul" services as if this is the be all and end all of the airport. Personally I don't think it ever has been and I can't see any scenario, even in the medium term, where it would be.
All of the demographic analysis on MAN and data on why people are travelling through the airport makes it very clear that it is a bigger version of UK regional airports like BHX and very different indeed to LHR. So the scale of MAN, because it effectively serves a larger number of urban centres, gives it an advantage - i.e. more MEB3 services than BHX or GLA for example. This scale will allow it to open up some niche opportunities like Saudi or HK for example and the airport team have a good idea what these opportunities are. They are realists too and chasing lost causes that will only ever deliver low volume and revenue even if they came off is not what you'd expect them to do.