If I owned an airline… 
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Set pricing for empty middle seats and give discounts to group travel and/or family that chooses to use the middle seat without inconveniencing others. If the airline needs to use the middle seat because of over booking or whatever offer half-off to both inconvenienced volunteering passengers during boarding.
Your airline will be the most popular, have the best reviews and will increase air travel. All it takes is a policy change. You would be satisfying business, group and family travel without changing the physical seat configuration. This would also be an easy website software change. The passenger would have to reserve all three seats at the same time or only be able to reserve every other seat. Charge 25 percent more then the cattle car competitor and see how things workout. Just do it on a couple runs… experiment.