I am in two minds over the whole concept of reserved seating. I can see why regular travellers who always use the same busy trains would like it but as someone who prefers to have flexibility I usually can't reserve seats and don't see why I should be penalised in favour of someone else who paid the same price for a ticket.
In the instance mentioned above where a person was booted out of a seat that IE staff hadn't bothered to label as reserved I wouldn't have moved on principle. At least the person who had the reservation was entitled to a refund, the person who unknowingly occupied an unmarked reserved seat is I assume entitled to nothing.
When I lived in the UK, on certain routes it was common for most of the train to be littered with reserved cards. Every single seating bay would have at least one reserved seat as of course the majority of people chose facing window seats. On several long journeys I ended up having to move seats a number of times as the only available seats were ones partially reserved, not fun at all.
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