No, it's not working the way he thought it would.
Here is the thing: on vastly reduced capacity, and increased fares, LCC has made a few quarters of money. What nobody who is pro-merger or who thinks Parker is a genius will admit is that the lion's share of said profits come from what was US-East. Those profits came about because the bankruptcy court allowed the US-East management to slaughter employee wages/benefits/pensions and screw creditors, not as a result of any management acumen on Tempe's part. But herein lies the problem: what to do when one cannot reduce capacity anymore?
Parker's answer is to buy Delta, use the bankruptcy court to further abuse creditors and leaseholders and employees, and continue to reduce capacity.
But in a year or two, even that move will begin to fade, and then they will have to start running the airline. Here is where is gets tricky. If you look at any of the big stuff, US/HP are basically still two airlines and the stuff they have tried to combine (website, notably) has been a complete and utter charlie fox.
By upping the offer, Doogie is basically mortgaging the assets that will be acquired to the hilt, which means an outrageous debt load. What remains unsaid is that many of the creditors who are going to get some of the pie may very well be the one's whose assets are being mortgaged. And, given the fact that an antitrust review will take a year, plus whatever time is spent in bankruptcy, it means that the creditors won't see their cash for awhile. More importantly, it means they won't see their stock for awhile--the latter is important, because if Doogie's crew can't get it together operationally, the stock is in trouble in the long term.
This is all about a quick financial hit, and has very little to do with creating a viable airline moving forward. DL/NW and DL/UA make much more sense that US/DL. UA/US makes sense. UA/DL makes somewhat less sense. DL/NW makes sense from a network standpoint and little else. DL/US only makes sense if the intention is to yank down capacity and completely gouge the east coast (which is why Doogie has such a hard-on for DL). It's not about running the airline 5 years from now. They've had two years, and have done operationally squat to integrate the two existing airlines. Paint looks good, though.