The thing is that a narrow-body like this can land at a much broader ranger of airports than a wide-body like a 747, which forces you to run people from regiona

The thing is that a narrow-body like this can land at a much broader ranger of airports than a wide-body like a 747, which forces you to run people from regional airports to a hub and then transfer onto the wide-body. So this gives you the ability to run far more point-to-point routes with a couple of hundred passengers, with less of the scheduling complexities of point-hub-hub-point connections.