Airline seating design

I'm a big guy and every time I've been on a plane I've wondered why seating isn't staggered somewhat to allow more shoulder room. Basically the seating design in airplanes seems poorly optimized to take advantage of the space in the cabin.

Click on the image below to enlarge the image of what I'm talking about.


The image on the left shows current standard seating with everybody's shoulder bumping into each other, and the variation on the right shows a proposed staggering of the seating to free up space. (Yes it's supposed to represent an airplane ;-) )

This doesn't even consider potential staggering in the "up and down" dimension but there is opportunity there also.



I saw another variation of this theme that prompted me to make this post, but this variation sits some people forward and some people backwards.