I agree on the flavor but I think part of it is that it's a lot of hassle and just doesn't look as appealing as breast meat. There's a higher chance of biting into gristle/something hard, the meat can be "slimy", and I find that at chains that do "fried chicken", at least, they do a generally poorer job of breading the meat. It's not crunchy and battered like a "chicken tender". Thighs are a different matter since you can pick/scrape off the bone with a knife and fork, but they're also larger so the batter to chicken ratio is sub-optimal.

Wings are tolerated because they're small and predictable, but I've been seeing the rise of "boneless wings" too. People generally don't have a problem with the thighs and legs of the chicken if it's served differently or just as "chicken" in another product. But on the bone it's messy.

"Boneless wings" are just pieces of breast shaped vaguely like wings. Or processed meat, like nuggets.

"Boneless wings" are nothing more than chicken nuggets with a fancy name.

When I cook any recipe with chicken, I replace the chicken breast with boneless thighs (Which actually is thigh meat with the bones removed), and it comes out so much better.

I don't think meat should be optimized for how easily you can mindlessly stuff it down your throat without paying attention, though.

Agreed. The fried thigh meat here in the fancy-recreations-of-blue-collar NYC restaurants is delicious, decadent even. I wonder how long until folks catch on.

> Leg and thigh meat has so much more flavor and is much more juicy than breast meat.

It's only “much more juicy” if you prepare or cook the breast meat wrong. Of course, you often do that if you you cook them together since dark meat needs to be cooked to a higher temperature for food safety reasons.

But, yeah, dark meat has a lot more flavor (and dark meat cooked on the bone has the best.)

Kenji Alt debunked this, and did a test to confirm; the bone insulates the meat and evens out cooking, but doesn't add flavor.