6.2 proves that AS Team is full of innovation and open to new ideas.
So, I have some. ^_^
Real world airlines rarely open a route without some sort of market research. Before their shiny jets fly between two amazing point in the globe, the airlines should at least have some idea about the market size, actual and potential number, the capacity already serving, other connection option, etc. IATA should have those number in which airline can subscribe to their monthly reports, each airport usually also publish their number of passenger with nice statistics, and also any legacy airline with access to Global Distribution System should be able to pull their competitor offering and benchmark their product against their competitor.
In AirlineSim, this information can be extracted from various sources such as Market Analysis, Fleet List, and Airport Pages. It would be wonderful to display this in the newly created Market Analysis page. I imagine the Market Analysis page be like the Load Summary of All Airlines Inventory page, where you can see the actual market size between two points, the capacity already deployed on the route and their ratings. I think then the Market Analysis page would be more useful. As an airline we don't really care how many seats left on a flight of other airlines, it's rather a passenger point of view. So instead of Availability, Load Factor, Seat Count and Rating might be more useful.
While AS offers us players many tools, it was a long standing "way of doing things" to not make things too easy.
In other words, the idea is to provide necessary tools, but to not serve them on a silver platter.
Also, an "actual market size between two points" is a bit meaningless to display, because it depends on many factors. you may have people traveling on Memphis to Des Moines Iowa that originated from flight Bangkok to Memphis. On other game world there may not be an easy connection from Bangkok to Memphis so there will be no passengers from MEM to DSM who originated in BKK.
Any such "size of market" information would only display O/D (origin/destination) traffic, and as we know AS is based on connections so you can multiply by tenfold or more the pax between a city pair. There is no easy way to display such actual market size under these conditions.
They really should hire you as spokeperson. I agree with not serve them on a silver plate, rather than silver plate I was simply ask for plastic plate.
The O/D traffic is good enough as it serve to indicate market potential, and we are fully aware that the O/D traffic can be serve by connection.
Not everybody is seasoned with cities all over the globe, but the number can give them a good picture of potential traffic.
What real airlines do before they open a route, is to study how many PAX travel between their hub and the unserved city using connections.
ie. Before for example LH decides to open a route from FRA to say SAN, they study how many people are flying on other airlines or LH's alliance members on a connection routing such as FRA-LHR-SAN or FRA-LAX-SAN etc and then decide if the route would be worth opening.
If the airline is really connection dependant, like Icelandair, they need to do that study multiple times. ie. When FY opens MCO-KEF, they need to study how many people are actually travelling MCO-LHR/FRA/CDG/MUC etc and then decide if the route is worth opening.
Neither tool exists in AS, which I believe is partly due to the fact that if it was it would make the game simply a programming exercise.