Secondly, Delta had their name in the top 5 of best airlines for many years, but following their aquisition of major portions of Pan Am, they're ratings dropped. Now, Pan Am wasn't the most glorious airline of all time, and it bugs when people say it used to be our "Unofficial Flag Carrier" they didn't have a hint of red in their paint scheme, besides warning strips! Pan Am pilots were grumpy fellas, and following the 2007 aquisition of Northwest, another airline that was full of bad service and such, our ratings went down again.
Obviously Delta isn't interested in how good or bad its reputations is, but on buying out lesser airline companies as a way of eliminating the competition. Nothing you can say can take away the fact that that is their business practice! Many large companies do this as a part of normal their normal practice. Delta is obviously one of them.

Also, if Southwest had a hub-system like almost all other big carriers, they'd lose luggage quite a bit too, since transferring luggage between connecting flights is tricky
What a load of rubbish! It's obvious that the speed with which they want to get the luggage from one aircraft to another. This allows for mistakes to be made and luggage to wind up in the wrong place. The main reason it happens is because of the pressure that is put on the employees, by the company, to get it done faster. To blame the hub is like trying to blame someone for your mistakes.

And just to go back to the spokesperson for Delta in the fiasco of the soldiers luggage that started this topic:
"If someone has 50 bags — and that's an extreme number — then someone else's aren't going to make it," he said. "The policies are meant for reasonableness. The airlines are overly generous 99.9 percent, but the question of should airlines provide everything for free, should Delta in this case help move the military personnel from base to base, I don't think that's the airline's job."
Fifty is a WHOLE lot more than FOUR! That has to be one of the most moronic statements I have ever read. What passenger on ANY airline is allowed to take 50 bags? None that I know of, that's for sure. So why use that number? It only makes Delta look more stupid than they had already made themselves look in the first place!