It’s funny, because the airlines’ respective reputations would seem to suggest that the opposite would be the case.

I totally agree with you that the Emirates service is shoddy at best.
Unfortunately the vast majority of people are crowd followers… Emirates introduces wider screens at the same time a passenger has one bad experience with AA and suddenly AA’s crap and Emirates is great.

Having said that, I think people are slowly starting to realise Emirates isn’t quite the airline its hyped up to be.