It is beyond rediculous. The evolution of the massive RJ bubble was so comical and so obvious to anyone without an MBA that laughing about it now almost makes up for the many, many billions of dollars it cost us that we'll never get back.

Then to compound the problem further, they went and scrambled everything up like you mentioned just to prevent an already almost impossible strike situation because of the Comair strike, while never bothering to spend a single salaried middle management man hour on how and why that strike came about in the first place.

DCI actually ran pretty well when any given hub was dominated by a single regional doing primarily out and back feed. But in order to prevent the almost impossible next strike that could have been easily avoided in the first place by minding the store instead of blindly trusting incompetent little lieutenants in the outsourcing chain of command, they instead threw crates of wrenches and bags of sand into the gears of an otherwise fairly efficient business model (the built in redundancy of overhead and the parasitic drag of outsourcing notwithstanding). Bringing that flying in house would significantly clean up the remnants of that mess we're currently stuck with.

As to your other point I completely agree that, for daily operations, Flight Ops should be calling the shots, unless another department wants to take a time out for a percieved safety issue of course.