Who flies with Ryanair ? People trying to save money.
If their website is too easy to use, these people will peruse it for hours, trying to find out the cheaper combination of flights to go from "somewhere near Madrid" to "somewhere near Berlin".
If RA raises the bar a little bit, these people will probably give up one or two queries earlier, hence picking some more "natural" route that will likely make RA a bit more money. Most customers won't think (or know) about the competition, RA has a very strong brand, so the chances that they'll just give up and go elsewhere are fairly slim, especially after having invested all that time going through captchas.
Captchas are very unfriendly towards older and less computer-literate people, but those segments are more likely to go through phone or agencies anyway.
As well as Dublin & Madrid, they also fly direct (ish) to: Nice, London (ish. Gatwick is a big London airport), Birmingham. etc.
However they do sometimes take the piss. Until recently you couldn't fly near Barcelona. Paris is still Paris (Beauvaus (sp?)). Rome, Brussles likewise.
I think they once advertised flights to Copehagen, the capital of Denmark, but the flight landed in Sweden!
Don't know why you are being downvoted - while they do fly to a lot of off airports they do fly from quite a few airports, we flow with Ryanair from Edinburgh to Marrakech earlier this year and it was perfectly OK. They were the only airline flying direct and as we were only going for 3 nights we didn't want a long detour via a hub.
Having said that, the Ryanair website is pure evil - the fact that the option to not buy insurance is half way down the list of countries is an example of just how devious they can be.
I have always gotten the feeling from them that they don't really want to help you find the cheapest flights. Little things like not allowing you to search for flights from all airports in a city, instead making you do multiple searches makes it hard to compare prices.
Ryanair have always been the first to change things radically. From scrapping travel agents, scrapping in flight meals, requiring you to pay extra for checked in luggage. Each of these could be seen as "too far", and yet they have grown by leaps and bounds each time. Why would this be an different?
Who flies with Ryanair ? People trying to save money. If their website is too easy to use, these people will peruse it for hours, trying to find out the cheaper combination of flights to go from "somewhere near Madrid" to "somewhere near Berlin".
If RA raises the bar a little bit, these people will probably give up one or two queries earlier, hence picking some more "natural" route that will likely make RA a bit more money. Most customers won't think (or know) about the competition, RA has a very strong brand, so the chances that they'll just give up and go elsewhere are fairly slim, especially after having invested all that time going through captchas.
Captchas are very unfriendly towards older and less computer-literate people, but those segments are more likely to go through phone or agencies anyway.
(Not that I care, I stopped using RA years ago.)