Big airports are already pretty saturated for traffic, and what most of us don't realize is that airplanes create vortices around the runway that the airport has to wait out. So more small planes can take off in an hour than large planes.
If you build smaller planes that fly farther, you don't need the hub and spoke pattern as much. If a direct flight cuts two hours off of your trip, makes it so you don't have to board two planes instead of one, that is both objectively faster and at least for me much less stressful.
Yes, but the bigger planes carry more than twice as many passengers. If we're talking about airport throughput efficiency of A380s vs Embraer 170/190s, the Airbus is going to win every time.
That said, most people want to fly point-to-point these days and not Hub/Spoke, and often _are_ willing to pay a few extra bucks to do it (I know I certainly will almost always take a direct flight if I can). This favours being able to use smaller airframes, and if it means avoiding a Hub airport it can be a lot more efficient. Where it gets dicey is trying to cram more and more aircraft through an already busy Hub. That leads to having to build more runways and doing things like double/triple simultaneous parallel landings.
If you build smaller planes that fly farther, you don't need the hub and spoke pattern as much. If a direct flight cuts two hours off of your trip, makes it so you don't have to board two planes instead of one, that is both objectively faster and at least for me much less stressful.