I generally defend Ryanair when the topic comes up (as it often does amongst travellers). That said, I recently had a bad experience and thought it worth sharing:

Another passenger (Debby) and I were the last two to board a flight. We followed directly on from those in front of us in the line (there was no break).
When Debby presented her identification to the lady at the gate she was told the flight had “closed” and that the remaining passengers had been "offloaded". The reason, it seems, was that we had waited until the line was short to join it, rather than standing in the line for a long time. This, apparently, was disagreeable to the man in charge of the gate, who was standing nearby (a Ryanair employee in high viz jacket with "team leader" written on the back). The man had closed the flight and “offloaded” us summarily - apparently to teach us some kind of lesson. The man in question then started chastising Debby for not waiting in the line, but rather “walking off”. He said he had “seen her” doing this. None of this made any sense because, as said, we followed on directly from those in front of us in the line.
The lady at the gate was apologetic in manner. She implicitly accepted that what was going on was ridiculous, and got on with “reloading” us onto the flight - after the man had finished trying to scare Debby.
Both I and Debby were reentered on the flight by the lady. This was a cause of some minutes of delay for us. When we arrived at the plane there was still a long line waiting on the tarmac to enter it.
Before leaving the gate I asked for identification from the man. He refused to provide any identification and, indeed, purposefully zipped his jacket up so I could not see his ID. I then asked the lady at the gate for some kind of identification for her. She was going to provide identification, but the man convinced her to refuse. (What an impressive “Team Leader” he is!)

The individual in question is wasting the time of both other employees and passengers. He was rude to others before we boarded, and tried to create difficulties for us for no reason at all. The experience we had appeared to be part of his standard modus operandi. His approach to customers would have fitted in well in the Soviet Union, but is entirely inappropriate in the context of a customer-service- based business.

Flying demands quite enough of passengers in these difficult times, without deliberate attempts by rogue staff to scare passengers (apparently as some sort of game or power trip). Worst of all? The company does not seem too concerned that it has a "team leader" who is wilfully disagreeable. They have failed to propose any meaningful action after two months of having the details of this case. They are, apparently, still busy passing the file around internally.

I am looking forward to seeing other low-cost airlines find the sweet spot when it comes to customer service. Ryanair got a lot better, but does not see to me able to quite grow up into a more mature operation.

What's the best low cost airline? That's easy, in my view. It's Norwegian.

Happy flying/safe travels.