Appreciate all the well informed replies, I suppose my post was in some ways perversely to trigger, but it confirms my belief that the short termist GBR narrative leading up to all these strikes must not be derailed in any way by the strong recovery we're seeing across most TOCS outside of the London commuter belt. Seeing one thing, hearing that things are actually far worse, and struggling to put the two together.
I suppose my title should have been "HS2 still needed, the hypocrisy of the current DfT narrative".
I won't name the TOC I work for (and hope that to still be the case for a very long time to come as it's still a great place to be work in the grand scheme of things with amazing colleagues), but I can assure you that despite our current service being at very healthy passenger levels and often full and standing, with numerous daily cancellations due to driver shortages, we're continually told company wide we have a large surplus and in response to strike action the narrative is very much "we're still way down, work patterns have changed forever, business and commuter traffic has reduced forever, and we've got nothing in the pot".
Our working day is very much back to normal, intense with lots of minimum breaks and max hours, longer continuous duration in the seat, no unused standby folk if allocated, bare minimum training levels, no route refresh days. I note however from friends that some other TOCS heavily exposed to London are still working slightly shorter than average hours jobs, with decent levels of training going on and quite a bit of passing built into the jobs still.
Something doesn't add up here. The projected capacity and frequency of HS2 seems insane, but hopefully very much needed when the time comes. I don't blame my TOC, I understand the message is very much coming from DfT and RDG, but it's frustrating and continuing to hammer down morale when the future really should be looking bright as our trains get much busier (and as evidenced by the ongoing construction of HS2).