I can sympathize with others on this. Quite some time ago we lost ALL Qantas flights north from Darwin and everyone of them was replaced by coughstar. We used to have a 767 service (from ADL) to Singapore, which apart from being full service, offered Business Class seats and a cargo hold that took containerized freight - great for mango exports and the like. Qantas, in it's infinite wisdom scrapped all its flights from Darwin north bound and replaced them with a very bad budget carrier. Now we have international visitors, some of whom have paid many thousands of dollars to travel First or Business Class, who get as far as Singapore and are then quite literally herded onto coughstar and introduced to the worst inflight service one can be subjected to.
It is interesting how little Qantas cares about a smaller market like Darwin, as we now have more competition returning to the market with the recent arrival of Philippine Airlines (DWN to MNL daily); Silk Air (DWN to SIN daily), the return of Air Asia to Bali (not bad for a budget carrier) and in November the return of Malaysian Airlines with flights 5 times a week to KL. But not a hint from Qantas about bringing back full service aircraft, even on the heavily booked Singapore run.
While it means I don't get to build FF points with QF, at least I don't have to suffer with coughstar any longer!