I'd support what you say if I felt it was happening here, but I don't. This bus company has only been operational for just over two years and its introduction unfortunately coincided with the pandemic, so it got off to a poor start through nobody's fault. Given the conditions pertaining, and the fact that buses ran around almost empty because of lockdown, to me it was praiseworthy that most journeys ran as staff had been found to operate them despite the considerable difficulties in recruiting staff. The process of choosing routes to run did seem somewhat opaque, though some thought had obviously gone into it, presumably mostly at Cornwall Council officer level. It was inevitable that at some stage within a year or two of GCB taking to the road some (possibly many) changes would need to be made on the basis of operational experience, including actual passenger numbers. Minor tweaks would, of course, happen every so often in the meantime as with any bus company.
Now a medium to big change, certainly a significant one, is about to take place, with forewarning of change to a further handful of routes in a few months time if passenger loadings don't improve. Looking at the changes overall, and bearing in mind my personal knowledge of East Cornwall routes is near zero, it seems to me that a lot of thought has gone into this, doubtless with much data extraction. It's my guess that both council and bus operator have played significant parts in this exercise with a person in charge who knows what they're doing and what they want to achieve. Now, if this recasting of the network were to change dramatically again within the next year or two, then I would agree with you that ridership would be discouraged, if not undermined. The instances of services going from hourly to nothing, or vice versa, is only true in a tiny number of cases, and mostly involving hamlets and stretches of road rather than whole routes. Some of the present routes raised eyebrows when they were introduced, seeming like ''nice ideas'' in an ideal world but unlikely to attract enough custom, and I notice a proportion of them do now seem either for the chop or a reworking. I think we should let these changes bed in (not all will work well, and may have to be altered again, perhaps at short notice) and maybe pass judgment at the end of the year?