I concur with your sentiments on not being able to find a parking place. ATL is an obvious problem, but others are too. I flew a 3 day trip last week that, once we left ATL on the first leg of the first day, we didn't have to see ATL again until the last leg of the last day. You wouldn't think parking at the outstations would be a problem, but some of them (especially MDW) are terrible. The four gates we have at MDW are "scheduled" to be vacant for about 5 minutes between flights. I believe we serve 9? cities there, and if any one flight is delayed, the rest of the day is a nightmare. I had FAs wanting to leave 10 minutes early on every leg, and I had to explain to them why doing this into MDW would just mean landing early, but waiting 10 minutes (minimum) for our gate. It's alot cheaper waiting on the ground in MSP (in this case) hooked up to jetway power, than idling one engine on the ground in MDW. BOS is the worst, but that has a little to do with the construction in the gate area and the 5 minute pushback that blocks the alley for each flight. MCO is pretty good, considering the number of flights; but it also has enough gates.
As far as the slowdown in growth, I think our plan had been to grow into areas where other carriers had pulled back. We've reached the point where their pull back is over, and therefore so is our large expansion. With money tight, I wouldn't be surprised to see us accepting some arrangements with cities/airports/the business community to begin new service to cities that guarantee no loss for a certain period of time. The thing I have always liked about our current management team is that they don't wait for the red ink to flow for awhile, make a scientific wild-ass guess that something's not right, take a few years to "study" what needs to be done, and then come up with a new paint job for airplanes to solve the problem (that "Elton" thing a few years back was embarrassing, but it allegedly generated some profit). Our guys are proactive, and if they say this is what needs to be done, I'm all for it. Having said that, I will state that I will refuse to fly any airplane that has lime green or pink sperm looking things on it.