Winding Line through London Heathrow

I'm writing this at London's Heathrow airport, a little over two hours before the flight is due to leave, and I've got a rant building up.

We've made it through security, and here's what we had to do to get there:

1. Take the Heathrow Express train from Paddington Station to the airport.  This went very smoothly and I highly recommend it.
2. Get off the train and look for information on our flight.  We were there three hours and ten minutes early.  They assign check-in zones to each flight, which is the first insanity.  If you're at the airport too early, they haven't assigned a zone yet and you can't check in yet.
3. Go through the line to get our VAT (Value Added Tax) refund.  Short line, long wait.
4. Head down to our 'zone' once it was assigned (D), find the right place to get into line to check in, and have two (2) guys standing there to tell us to go use their convenient self service kiosks that were back where we had come from (the border of zones C and D).
5. Get into a short line at the kiosks (but longer that it would have been if the two (2) guys hadn't directed us away from the checkin stands) and punch some numbers into the kiosk, get boarding passes printed.  Worth noting that these kiosks were manned by approximately one BA employee per 3-4 kiosks.  However, since we had bags to check...
6. Find the entrance to the line for the "Fast Bag Check" line (very long, not fast), which was also guarded by two (2) people who had to check our tickets and I assume provide assistance of some sort (in fact all they successfully did was annoy me).
7. Get to the end of the Fast Bag Check [sic] line, there was the normal guy at the head of the queue to point you to the next available counter.  Get to the counter, hand over passports and ticket, get bags checked by counter attendant.
   
   So far we've interacted with 2 + 1 + 2 + 1 + 1 people (that's 7 for those of you who wondered when all that math stuff would be useful in real life) in a process that used to take maybe 3 (one to help direct people, one to point people at the next counter, one to man the counter).
   
   The Fast Bag Check [sic] line did not move any faster than the checkin queues of old, nor was it smaller.  This seems more like a make-work scheme for BA than any way to make the checkin process more pleasant and efficient.  In cases where the kiosk system is done well in the States I've seen that process go down to two personel.  Plus they don't have to assign checkin areas, something I've seen around Europe.
   
   Now for the security fun...
8. Get into the security line, where they ask you if you have the gels, liquids, etc. in a winding line that was basically empty.  Get passport/boarding pass checked at a counter, which then lets you through to... another winding line.  Note that no one had opened the tape things in the winding line to let people walk straight through easily since the number of people going through was so low.  That would probably require thinking a little bit about passenger convenience.
9. Go through security, fairly typical.
10. Arrive on the other side a little more than two hours ahead of flight time, look for which gate the flight will be out of and... it isn't set yet.  In fact, it won't be set for quite a while, so now we need to keep our eyes on the time to make sure we notice the gate assignment and head out there at the right time.

The Winding Line -> Choke Point -> Winding Line thing has happened a few times in Europe so far.  It is like people are going out of there way to create jobs through stupid inefficiency.  This was particularly bad in Italy, and in that case I truly believe it was just an attempt to keep more people uselessly employed.

British Airways obviously has put no thought into how to make the checkin process truly more efficient and pleasant for their passengers.  In fact I saw a man who was a 'premier' member or Europe Club or some kind of rewarded frequent traveller ask what he was supposed to do (that's not a good sign by itself) and was told to go through the same annoying thing we did, and we're in Cattle Class Plus.

I've heard complaints by friends and family during this trip about how Britain is stagnant, caught up in its own rules, and comfortable with mediocrity.  The only exceptions I've seen are from immigrants, and at this point I think they're the country's only serious hope at remaining competitive.

It is worth noting that once we got onto the airplane (after more silliness at the gate) everything was great.  British Air does a very good job at that point, it was a very pleasant flight and the staff in the air were great.  Getting to that point is an amazing display of strange corporate decisions, though.