Indeed if you search enough on flyertalk you could find old posts of mine claiming I wouldn't fly Ryanair if I were paid to do so.
But that was before 2018 November when they have changed. I find them one of the best price/fee wise, it's completely clear as what you pay for and what you get. There's no opaque "personal item", no, it's a 40 x 25 x 20 cm bag and the sizer is 42 x 30 x 20cm ensuring anything compliant will really fit. I have yet to find another airline which would so readily disclose the actual sizer dimensions. You want to bring a bigger bag, pay for priority. They only sell a given amount of priority so the bags actually fit on board. You want leg space, here, book an emergency row, yes it has a price but again: you get what you pay for.
Of course, you still need to walk to the plane most likely (sometimes you get on a bus) and then walk up the stairs -- not as easy as a legacy airline with jetways for sure. But then again, no legacy airline, not even all legacy airlines together can match the network of Ryanair, it's really something else.
I respectfully disagree: I find myself booking Ryanair more and more because, as I mentioned above, they are the ones who fly on the route I want to fly. Real world examples: I now live in Malta, I want to visit my parents at Budapest. Only FR flies MLA-BUD direct. I want to continue on to my brother in the UK who in Suffolk so out of the many London airports, Stansted is closest. Guess who flies BUD-STN? And they have STN-MLA too. That's three routes I fly often and there's really no competition. It's good they cleaned up their act before I moved back to Europe, really.
Ryan Air are borderline decent if you only carry a cabin bag and get the "prority" package. You should see Wizz Air. They're worse than booking.com and Sixt combined, no flying over Ukraine and getting downed by trigger happy separatists.
Luckily neither one of those companies had any crashes so far, just one Belorussian jorurnalist kidnapped, an engine failure and bird strikes. No crazy copilot killing himself along with all the passengers in the airplane or getting downed by trigger happy separatists while flying over Ukraine.
Ryan Air was so bad with the latter that I flat out stopped flying with them. It happened a couple times I had to pay some extra 40 EUR for not reading the fine print carefully enough (i.e. I paid for a cabin bag, but I had to pick up a tag for it at the check-in counter instead of going straight to the gate to avoid an extra fee)
Imo unbundling is fine if you are allowed to make informed decisions about what you want or not. If you feel like you've been tricked or robbed after using a product it's probably going a bad way.