Paris has some descent restaurants. Pasta is pretty good in Rome. Argentina makes a passable steak.

On a typical intn'l trip, which is what you are critiquing, you spend about 3 hours total in your home base airport. You don't eat there unless you just want to. Usually you just wait to get the first class menu to make your choice from.

Hey man, if you like it where you are and it works for you, great, mazel tov. If you are going to try and make intn'l widebody sound bad, you've got an uphill climb. There is, right now, a 3 day trip on the 777 in ATL worth almost 32 hours. Do the math on that, figure your days off and tell me how many days in your bed and time for hobbies you end up with.