Kool-Aid,
Not to be a total jerk but comparing our refusals to anyone else's is meaningless. They should be comparing our refusals to last years and the year before and looking only at UA.
Take an A320 into LGA with no A-Skid? (etc.) No problem. Take the uber-guppy? Well, that might not be such an easy decision. How many of those Top-Fuel funny planes do we have? How many does DAL?
Not sure if it's still the case, but for a while at Brand-X airline, guys were immediately pulled off a trip and suffered pay loss when they refused a plane. How often did that policy effect pilots decisions? How many guys took broken trash because of it? How many of those flights
should have been refusals and was there a potential (negative) impact on the safety of those flights? At some point, the guy with the cool hat is obligated to say "Nyet!"
To minimize refusals, fix planes promptly, and when that's impossible, route them in a manner which will minimize impact to the operation.
Years ago a 767 was dispatched to GRU without an APU. A whole mess of guys refused it, over and over. Finally, Marvin took it. Well, guess what, it shat a gen and they did the 0300 divert into a Big E. The plane sat for days. Whose dumb decisions affected the operation the most?
*Very glad to read the positive from OM and the rest of your post.