> The training is what provides the ability to charge for admission and airtime royalties for games. The meeting is what gives you a product or service offering.
The cost analysis of the meeting is however helpful to make people realize that there's way too many people in that meeting. It's just like a sports team where half of the players are not actively training while you're paying them all. And on top of that, the effectiveness of a meeting decreases very quickly with the number of participants.
While I do agree with you that the opportunity cost based analysis is better, I do want to point out that for this context (or any context where this might be the case) the opportunity cost of doing an opportunity cost based analysis might be high enough to warrant opting for the inferior but easier/cheaper cost based analysis.
Of course there might be an easier way to quantify the opportunity cost that I can't think of.
"Is the the best possible use of our time, collectively, and/or of each of us, individually, for the organization and our collective goals?"
I suspect you'll find that more effective people tend to recognize when they're in a meeting they 1) don't need to be in and 2) which is keeping them from doing something more important.
Socializing, strengthening group cohesion, and other organizational (as opposed to individualistic) objectives may mean that even if you personally perceive greater benefit at being elsewhere, the organizational / collective goal may still trump, which is why that's included in the metric.
The concern isn't to do a thorough evaluation where that's not itself cost-effective, but to use the correct basis for measurement. Deciding on imperfect information is perfectly acceptable. Deciding on the wrong basis should really be avoided where possible.
The cost analysis of the meeting is however helpful to make people realize that there's way too many people in that meeting. It's just like a sports team where half of the players are not actively training while you're paying them all. And on top of that, the effectiveness of a meeting decreases very quickly with the number of participants.