*Or*...
Actually quite a lot of passengers don't really understand Orange Credit Card size tickets and the various reservation coupons that come with them*, and would actually prefer an App that clearly states train, time seat, and will repond to notifications on their phone. Different tools are required for different needs
*See the folk who will gladly give a Train Manager every single coupon outputted by their booking - outward and return - for them to sort through. Exactly which coupon is which is really not "obvious" to exactly the sort of discretionary passengers the railway needs to attract.
The fact that ticketing is a mess isn't a reason to move to something far less flexible.
There is absolutely no reason why the system has to produce multiple tickets - it would be quite possible to print all the required information on one ticket, if they could be bothered to sort it. And that wouldn't disadvantage anyone - unlike the proposal being discussed here, if that was made mandatory.
True. I might not like it myself, but "airline style" is by far the simplest way for the IC railway to operate. Nobody finds booking an easyJet flight complicated - it is genuinely easy. You book it on their website, you put in where from and to, you pick which flight, are told how much it is, you pay and then you print your boarding card or have it on your phone. Then you rock up when it says and sit in your allocated seat at the specified time with no arguments about validity.
Enthusiasts don't like it, but almost everyone else does.
Sorry, but you are a long way wide of the mark.
While people travelling longer distances might well like to book in advance (and note that this is already fairly straightforward using a phone app, if they want to do it this way, then they just need to show the ticket in the app to the guard - hardly onerous) the fact is that for short distances it's useless. e.g. I've at various times I've needed to travel from York to Doncaster a lot, without any notice, and not knowing how long I wuld be there - so I'd turn up at the station, tell the ticket machine that I want a return to Doncaster, and get on the first train which appears. Likewise coming back, minus buying the ticket. What could be simpler than that? Frankly, I don't want to fiddle around with an app or join the ticket office queue to have to book a seat.
This sort of thing might work if (as some other countries do) we had long-distace and stopping trais running the same routes - but the fact is that for most of the country we don't, and the long distance ones also serve local traffic.
If people want to reserve that's fine, but it should not be forced on everyone. The railways' big selling point is that they are turn up and go - and if that is taken away, or even made significantly more awkward, many people will just not bother. If the railways are serious about trying to attract people back, this is the last thing they should be doing!