Hardly - have you seen the timetables for the 25 or the 38 with alternate buses finishing "short". Or the heritage runs on the 9 (and until recently on the 15).
And of course unscheduled curtailments happen far more in London that around the country.
What does happen of course is that buses going the full length of the route are busier so you get uneven loadings.
Where's the evidence that TfL think passengers are too thick? I suspect they merely think passengers get irritated by a bus with their number on that is of no use to them. Routes working in sections did tend to be far more complex than they needed to be - especially the routes where it was impossible to catch a bus that ran the full length of a route - not usually obvious from a map. This could make the 207, 253 and many other routes very annoying.
You unwittingly make my point for me. When it suits the bus route controllers, buses can get turned short and the first the passenger knows about it is when an announcement is made 'this bus terminates here', often in the very recent past without any transfer ticket, so having to pay again for the inconvenience caused. The 25 and 38 are more examples, again both fairly recent, of it being for TfL's convenience, in both instances I would imagine of perceived incapacity ar the Oxford Circus and Clapton Pond stands respectively. Go to Holborn Circus and watch the third 25 in a row (literally) turning short there and all the passengers who've decamped waiting for one going through to Oxford Circus (no good looking for an 8 as they're not going through now while Crossrail work is on.)
As for 9 and 15, first of all it's the 9 H that's come off not the 15 H, the suffixes indicating the official route numbers even though the buses don't show them, so they are not strictly speaking short workings, but different routes.
It has certainly been stated by TfL's bus division that the general public cannot in the main understand the following:-
(A) Suffixed routes, so the century-old 77A had to become the 87, a route number always associated with the Barking area;
(B) Destination blinds with intermediate points 'because the bus may already have gone through that location when the passenger boards';
(C) Scheduled short workings, so every 21 has to drag through to Newington Green when Moorgate, Finsbury Square would do for half and provide a nice, completely empty bus in the p.m. peak to take the hordes southbound.
TfL may have slightly changed their position on (C) but the general dogma still persists, so that the 208 was no longer allowed to work in two, mostly overlapping sections, so instead the 320 had to be extended to Catford on a different frequency meaning between Catford and Bromley Common the two often run together followed by quite a gap.
