One major mistake Airbus made, or perhaps tradeoff, is that they put the cockpit on the first level, you'll note the 747's is on the second level. This made it

One major mistake Airbus made, or perhaps tradeoff, is that they put the cockpit on the first level, you'll note the 747's is on the second level. This made it dead in the water for cargo, the ability to include an opening nose cargo door massively improves the cargo options of an airline freighter. As others have pointed out, the A380 brought volume more than tonnage to the game, and to utilize volume you need a way to get large objects into the plane, a nose door is the only way to do this on a passenger turned cargo jet, no backdoors. The Airbus Beluga is an example of getting around this limitation, but this isn't a scalable option for normal freighters.