Yes, I should have said mainstream personal travel. As someone who travels mostly on business, I'm not the one picking the absolutely cheapest base fee.

On the other hand, those business travelers mostly don't even care about early boarding or baggage fees anyway because they're either expensing them or get them for free because of status.

You are very fortunate. I often flew trans-Atlantic for a former company and their travel secretary was under instructions to find the absolute cheapest fare without consideration. So I occasionally ended-up with weird connections in Manchester or Newark instead of a non-stop from Dublin.

Economy class, of course.