The gains just mean that I sit on the bus while twice as many people are trying to board at every stop. The bus is stopped for twice as long.

So 1/Nth of the ridership is gonna have their stop deleted at a sum total of X man years. But it's all gonna be worth it based on a projected possible upside that may not materialize dependent upon many factors?

This is even worse than the usual slight of hand wherein one takes a widely diffuse hard to quantify cost and rounds it to zero and then dishonestly acts as though that justifies implementing their pet policy that has some small upside because in this case the downside is known and the upside is less defined.

I'm open to the idea that we could improve the system by deleting stops, but in light of a quantifiable downside I don't see a convincing argument without having some quantification on what the upside looks like.