Just as well that the discussion isn't about the pesky intercity services, oh...
FWIW I think you'll find that Bald Rick is very much aware of the balance between standing and sitting, certainly that's the impression I got from a number of posts in the Class 700 thread! Anything to get your dig at abellio in I guess
I was more referring back to the original discussion made by another poster about the similarities between the bids and the low amount of rolling stock being ordered, I wasn't commenting specifically on the issues with the train in particular, I shouldn't have gone off-topic though so I apologise for that.
It's just that Abellio's bids tend to be a lot about marketing and what they can achieve in theory but in practice look pretty iffy because it's not as simple as it looks with numbers. You can bet your life a bid manager has seen the size of the class 180s and the number of passengers they can accommodate and that was all they used for their calculation pretty much.
The Abellio Greater Anglia bid has always looked iffy for the commuter services and to a lesser degree the Intercity and Stansted Express services. The local services for the 3/4 carriage FLIRTS I would not expect to be a problem and never have, although there are potential issues with stabling and fuel with them which probably can be overcome. The Commuter fleet they are going to have quite a few issues with though unless they keep some old stock on.
I see many of the same issues with a few of Abellio's franchises, they have an excellent marketing team but with serious issues with Scotrail leading to them being put on notice, a bid that has already encountered several problems on Greater Anglia with further problems to come where the ops team have been sold a pup and this bid where they're relying on awfully unreliable trains and extremely tight fleet numbers, suggests they are a lot of style and promises but struggle with delivering it.
Abellio have been a breath of fresh air on GA prior to the most recent franchise award, they tended to have better balanced teams for previous awards, a good mix of engineering, operations and bid management people. In the last few years they've got the balance wrong and seem to be going all out to win franchises with promises made by bid managers that the operations teams have, from what I have heard, had little input in and that is worrying, as since bid managers are good with numbers and theory, they don't know the practice of things, which leads to things like 180s being proposed.